When text looks like text but isn't

I spent a happy hour or two this afternoon drawing a whole series of pages of script which wasn't rally script, but looked vaguely like some unknown foreign script, as part of the work for my pathway project on writing.  I had seen some work by Brazilian artist Leon Ferrari, and that had inspired me.  I am planning to turn my drawings into silk screens and print the out, including onto fabric, o I can then stitch into and over the "text".

This is what some of my pages look like at present.

But I've just come across a web-reference (the link is here) to something called Asemic Writing - i.e. writing which sin't real text, but i entirely made-up, like the work I've jut done.    Like this (from here) :

Oh goodness me!  There are whole magazines (on line, anyway) about this kind of thing.  How weird is this?  And I have to admit it is fun to do - as others have found too - "Oh Boy, I am smitten!" says this one, whose work includes this beautiful piece

Another South American, Mirtha Dermisache, from Argentina, has been producing astonishingly beautiful, I think, asemic writings and drawings since the 1970s.  Here are a few of her images

 More images of her work on Flikr here.


 One thing leads to another: asemic writing takes me inexorably towards Concrete Poetry, the kind of poetry where the visual shape of the words is at least as important as the meaning, maybe the visual actually enriches or illustrates the meaning, or maybe the visual is the point, and the meaning or any words  used doesn't much matter.   A useful definition and some examples of different types of concrete poetry are  on Infinity's Kitchen blog here which includes this succinct exemplar:

lesabres in unlesbares ubersetzen by Claus Bremer (1963). Translated from German.

But people have been doing this, i.e. playing around with text and images, for a very long time.  This was done by Simmias of Rhodes, a 4th Century BC poet and scholar.  It is called Hacha and is about a double-header axe, which is the image produced by his arrangement of the words.

This last image, and Lots more about text in art history on a really useful blog here.