Wall

By Ellen Portch

The drawings that comprise Wall allude to trauma and institutionalisation. They do not form a straightforward narrative or make some simplistic statement. They have the urgency of improvisations, yet they are carefully organised and almost painfully detailed with naked walls and bodies inside sparse antiseptic spaces. The drawings are not the literal representation of an experience so much as a protective editorial process of expression. Together the drawings have the elusive logic of a nightmare. Their mystery is part of their terror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Titus Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781877441837

Book preview

Notes on Walls

In the autumn of 1944 Ludwig Wittgenstein lodged in a house close to his fellow philosopher G.E. Moore’s long-time residence on the outskirts of Cambridge. Wittgenstein was both an argumentative and a restless man, and he often found himself marching down the road to Moore’s home, in the hope of engaging his friend in what he rather euphemistically called ‘friendly philosophical conversation’. Moore had recently suffered a stroke, and his doctor had ordered him to avoid stress and excitement; not surprisingly, then, the elderly philosopher showed some reluctance to engage in discussion, and tried to set limits on the length of Wittgenstein’s visits. Wittgenstein himself had little sympathy for Moore’s protests: he insisted that his old friend should be happy to ‘die with his boots on’ in the midst of philosophical debate.

The conversations that got Wittgenstein and Moore so agitated concerned the foundations of human knowledge, and the question of whether anything can ever be known for certain by humans. In 1925 Moore had published an essay called ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, in which he argued that there were some