Rainfall With Language

Jessica Diamond became known in the 1980s for her murals with text. Following the tradition of militant wall-painting, the artist produces, sometimes in the form of picture-poems, fragmented texts with a powerfully critical message, mostly pithy comments on global economic chaos. Inspired by a nineteenth-century Taoist book of meteorology that compares storms to orgasms, in her series Eros (Rain), which includes Rainfall With Language, Diamond seeks to give visible shape to the display of love. In colours of striking surface intensity, the Correggio-like motifs of clouds, rain and storms are sometimes combined with succinct words or graphic signs. Rainfall With Language displays a shower of streaming lines unravelling into word fragments and indecipherable letters. The ground is of a uniform ultramarine blue reminiscent of the sky or darkened waters. The trailing raindrops are the colour of graphite, giving the impression of long pencil strokes, thus conjuring drawing and writing at once. Metaphorical in its rich association of rain and words, nature and the human body, Rainfall With Language in the same way puts forward in its combination of painting, drawing and writing a fusion of another order: that of signs.