Sacha Archer's Stamp Pad Notes: Reading a poem with no beginning or end?
Primary Language . 2025 Sacha Archer's exploration of the materiality of language has pleasantly mystified and amused me for several years. His stamp pad works stage linguistic characters within an indeterminate visual field, where they exceed their semantic function and operate instead as shifting forms and surfaces. Reconfiguring text as a visual event, Archer foregrounds its potential to destabilize meaning while simultaneously inviting aesthetic play. Like Steve McCaffery’s Carnival series, Archer’s work favours a serpentine composition. However, where McCaffery's pieces feature map-like structures and legible words, the characters in Archer's works stand alone, fluidly tracing paths that suggest an organic movement akin to biological drift in illusory space. His poems often employ a free-form jumble, in contrast to the a subtle rectilinear scaffolding of McCaffery’s typewritten works. Words tumble, and through repeated forms he weaves structural webs that might best be...