The Hands own Intelligence: Ana Hatherly

Born in Oporto in 1929, Ana Hatherly is at once lively and serene. Her intelligence and self-awareness command respect. Taking stock of a career that spans forty years, she presents herself as an artist who was first a writer and whose work has evolved around the power of words. This power lies both in the meaning of words and in their visual, graphic qualities. Im an artist of the written line, she observes. But she does make a distinction between her work as a writer, and that of the artist. There is, however, an intimate link between these two dimensions of her work. Hatherly published her first book of poetry, Um Ritmo Perdido (A Lost Rhythm) in 1958. She began exploring the potential of poetry in the 1960s, joining the Group of Experimental Poetry, whose members were among the first to write concrete poetry in Portugal. Concrete poetry depends on the notion that a poem is, above all, a constellation of signs on a white page. The reading of the poem is always underpinned by its visual representation, so that the poem is, in the first place, a kind of drawing. It was in this context that Hatherly began her arduous research into writing. Examining Baroque poetry and Alexandrine verse during her long and distinguished academic career, she has found in western culture an ancient tradition linking writing as an activity that produces meaning with writing as pictorial mark. During the 20th century, this tradition was again explored by Dada and surrealist poets, and later, in concrete poetry. Soon, Hatherly began to look further afield, away from western culture. In the 1960s, a friend gave her a dictionary of Chinese characters, both new and archaic. I began to copy these drawings to me they were just drawings, because I couldnt read Chinese, and anyhow, their meaning wasnt what interested me, she observes. The genesis of Hatherlys pictorial art lies in forgetting what she knows and reinventing writing anew each time. How do I do that? By making writing illegible. I always say that what is needed is to see the writing, and not what is written. She began copying the manual of Chinese characters: I copied and copied, until my hand itself become comprehending, intelligent. It is, then, on the basis of the hands own intelligence that Ana Hatherly constructs her drawn and painted images. Her idiom is profoundly indebted to calligraphy, and if it appears to be governed by a certain unconscious drive, she never abandons a transfiguring clarity.

The title of her forthcoming exhibition, Handmade, is particularly apposite. Hatherly aims, above all, to privilege facture, to counter the trend for mechanically produced images, and so to give value to the unique and individual object. I chose the title because in highly industrialised societies, the rubric handmade gives the object value. Made by hand. Hatherly has worked on her various activities in tandem, allowing for a degree of mutual osmosis between them. She participated in the renowned avant garde exhibition Alternativa Zero organized by Ernesto de Sousa in 1977; her drawings and paintings have been widely exhibited. As a writer, she has published extensively, both experimentally and more traditionally. Opposed to any form of dogma, the scope of her vision is as historically broad as it is profound: in this sense, there is a kind of elasticity both in her verbal constructs and visual images. Among her best known works are the Tisanas, an open ended series of short, epigraphic texts, a project that has lasted some thirty years. In the economy of their means and their desire to induce a sense of strangeness and dislodge the reader from old reading habits, they appropriate the manner of Zen fables. How do these relate to the way Ana Hatherly lives her life? The artist is as reticent about her private life as she is expansive about her work. I was born, I lived, Ill die, she says, chuckling.

Ruth Rosengarten Viso, 13 April, 2000 Ana Hattherly, Handmade: Recent Works, Centro de Arte Moderna, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 2000.