Browse Exhibits (1 total)

Everyday natural writing is exactly as it sounds. It is the natural writings, or most commonly "carvings," that people leave for artistic purposes, sending a message through lasting engravings, and sometimes just do aimlessly for the fun of it. In this exhibit you will get only a glimpse at natural writings elements caught in photos; some are only temporary but others may last for decades. Such writings included are artifacts that consist of sand-writing, tree-writing, cement-writing, and sky-writing. Many of these artifacts were donated by individuals from around the globe, and to those who contributed, we say thank you.

That is to say, however, natural writing is not always necessarily taken from a form of nature, but rather using nature to communicate with others of an unknown agenda.

In "The Technology, Environments, and Materials of Everyday Writing," Jacob W. Craig says new forms of everyday writing are usually focused on the relationships between writers’ technologies and contexts. However, this is the beauty in natural everyday writing. There is such a lack of technology, with airplanes being the exception, but strong beauty that covers a surface with a message still being portrayed. Natural everyday writing proves a point within itself that technology is not always needed; sometimes to leave an everlasting image, you just need the guts to vandalize, a stick, and the will to write, knowing that someone out there only might see it.

In order to classify it into a genre, we must "create a new genre," for this exhibit. According to Amy J. Devitt in "Generalizing about Genre," the concept of genres have been around since the times of Aristotle, where he first classified his own works as either a comedy, tragedy, or epic. If genres had to be created in the first place, then why can't we keep creating new ones? The answer is, that we can and we will. Therefore, the genre of this exhibit will be up to you to decide while you look through it. A personal opinion on the genre of the exhibit shall be given by Sophia Ziemer, curator, in the concluding section. That is to say, the genre should not be set, but should rather be ambiguous to certain subjects such as natural writing because everyone observes differently. 

Natural writing is all around us, we just have to find the urge to look for it. By taking natural writing into consideration as everyday writing, we expand limitations put into classifying everyday writing by "being mundane pieces of writing without any scholarly attribute," and turn it into something that can leave an impact on the world.