Nikol Boyadzhieva

Aftoglyphs : An Investigation into the Aesthetics of Early Linguistic Development

nikol.boyadzhieva@yahoo.co.uk

Frontal view of the Aftoglyph installation: printed fabric on plinth, audio equipment and painted panels

'Aftoglyphs', 2025, installation view, C19, ECA Graduate Show 2025

Practice and Research

The need to communicate and 'leave ones mark' is innately human; this desire is evident even in the earliest archaeological evidence preserved of prehistoric man. The use of both representational and nonrepresentational symbols as units of shape continues to be used throughout all of human history, even past the point of the twentieth century’s ‘death of painting’.

As part of my Aftoglyph installation, I have created a series of 121 individual glyphs, each drawing on shapes that are organic and familiar and yet completely alien and abstract all at once. I have attempted to sequence my individual understanding of line and form and distill this information into the collection of glyphs, the result becoming a fingerprint of my aesthetic language. I use a combination of various targeted research methods and fine-tuned automation to inform my practice.

I am concerned with discovering the obscure and exploring the innate. The constituent parts of the installation invite the viewer to piece the works together and make their own discoveries.

'Aftoglyphs', 2025, installation, acrylic and ink on wood, 121 x 17cm x 17cm, digital fabric print, 200cm x 110cm, ink on canvas, 11 x 30cm x 30cm, audio, 7 minutes 34 seconds duration

Aftoglyph Installation Audio : 'Glyph Song'

The following audio can be heard through the headphones when stood in front of the plinth, as part of the 'Aftoglyph' Installation.

The audio accompanies the text written in the book on the plinth. Using a reverse spectrogram, I was able to sequence the sound of each glyph based on the arrangement of pixels when digitised.

Thus the audio corresponds to or 'reads out' the sequences of symbols.