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The process of abstraction is intimately involved in human communication, even communication with ourselves as individual beings. It is a process in which the senses and the intellect are closely interconnected: we take everyday experience in through our senses, but then the brain ‘makes sense’ of these experiences. We feel the warmth of the sun on our skin, but we don’t know what the sun is, except through a process of abstraction. As Mary Eagle notes, experiences of the senses, unmediated by mind, by abstraction (such as certain traumatic experiences) are rare. However, at the same time that we acknowledge processes of mind in relation to sensory experience, we should not forget the role of the senses, the bodily aspects of the process of abstraction.

Artists who use abstraction play consciously and unconsciously with the relationship, fundamental to communication, between form and meaning. Vernon Ah Kee’s works ask the viewer to engage with this relationship. Mary comments that ‘Vernon pushes forward in his work the bonding of message with the form of the message… so you really can’t just have those words as sounds, they are embodied in the colour, the thickness, the background, the change of tone, the change of colour across the lettering… being made aware of those characteristics, having them thrust at you in the way that he does, keeps drawing you… not just to the meanings of the words, but to their material existence…’ The concrete and the abstract are forcefully and simultaneously presented to us in these works.

Another characteristic of abstraction in human communication is its uncertainty – each act of communication is never completely resolved and clear, either for the person who communicates or the person who listens, or watches. Mary explains the work of art in the light of these understandings: ‘the work of art is a communication from one person that is embedded in the object; the object becomes the physical manifestation of a moment of expression, and it retains that, but it can never come entirely across; the beauty of a fixed and beautiful object is somehow that business of it being a message being contained… that, I think, is the power of the art object’.