ASSEMBLAGES
Developed between 2016 and 2026, ASSEMBLAGES explores what happens when language is subjected to the logic of collage. Borrowing its title from the artistic tradition of assemblage, where unrelated physical objects are brought together to create a new whole, the project performs a similar operation using words.
The resulting combinations are neither simple puns nor conventional neologisms. They operate as conceptual triggers. By forcing together incompatible, distant or contradictory terms, the work produces semantic friction. New meanings emerge that are often humorous, unsettling, poetic or politically charged.
A term such as CITRONUIT derives its energy from the collision of opposites. Other combinations may bring together desire and envy, knowledge and violence, intimacy and social critique. The resulting hybrids open a space between recognition and uncertainty where language becomes both material and subject.
Like much of Neil Wood’s practice, ASSEMBLAGES occupies a territory between visual art and literature. The works may exist solely as words, yet they possess a physical and visual presence that exceeds their linguistic origins. They are encountered less as definitions than as propositions: compact verbal objects that invite contemplation before interpretation. Whether they suggest images, characters, narratives or social situations remains open.
Rather than treating language as a vehicle for meaning, ASSEMBLAGES treats words as material. The act of joining becomes the work. Once assembled, the new form acquires its own identity and presence, independent of its constituent parts. Like an object placed in a gallery, it is encountered first as itself and only afterwards as a carrier of possible meanings.
“I’m interested in chance improbable liaisons. The collision is often more revealing than the individual parts.”