I chose to investigate the hypertextual nature of the manuscripts of Irish scribes with this project. Hypertext by definition is ‘text that reveals itself progressively’. In relation to Irish medieval manuscripts this relates to the fact that many variations of a text can exist, as scribes didn’t merely transcribe, but altered texts; customised them to their own understanding and the context into which they would be delivered. “With the loss of an ‘authoritative and untouchable’ authorical identity comes a new sense of dialogic identity, created by a sense of being perpetually in dialogue with other texts and writers.”

My initial brain-storming seemed to keep coming back to the idea of  ’light’. I’m dealing with illuminated manuscripts, attempting to shed light on the practices of their authors, highlighting their contribution to communications design, and these manuscripts, in both content and design, were designed to enlighten.

I began with the word ‘lumen’ (lm) – a unit of measurement for the amount of light emitted by a source. In Illustrator I made a glyph of the ‘l’ and ‘m’, joining them to make one continuous letter-form. I didn’t want to make this an exclusively digital project because one of the defining features of these manuscripts is the presence of the author’s hand (in all its forms).

Rendering this concept of evolving text, or content that revealed itself progressively, led me to use quilling (curling paper) to fill out the glyph. As well as being aesthetically similar to the intricate La Tene designs that we know from such manuscripts as The Book of Kells, it also gives the idea that discrete packets of information are held within the letterforms, some of which can be manipulated to reveal even more text. This interaction, and the the document being changed by the reader (who puts it back together again and therefore also becomes author) is the core concept of hypertextuality that I wanted to explore. The document becomes something fluid, that changes on ‘reading’, and the presence of ‘the hand’ in the work (both authoring and reading) is clearly visible.