What takes shape is less a process of visual rendering than a ritual approach to experience, assembling a composite from pieces that are not read, but as Illich describes- symbolic scripts in which “the reader must find the spoken expression from recollecting what has been said before”. Alexandrya Eaton’s Language (2000), is perhaps the most overt expression of building a visual rhetoric. The large grid of sixteen panels articulates the tension between abstraction and meaning that holds her entire body of work together, a reminder to pull apart each small piece to see the interdependency and relationships of parts to the whole. What is conveyed in this grid is not repetition, but a suggestion of grammar and syntax, a theme with variations that must be decoded to be understood, tangible also in other recent grids of Eaton’s where she has integrated separate smaller panels, as in Dozen (2002), and Nine (2002). in her own words, “I think of each one of my paintings as one in a series. The series is composed of all the paintings I have ever done, and all that will follow”.