This is a braided critical text distributed in five parts across Ryan Gander's latest monograph, Grunts, Hoots, Whimpers, Barks and Screams, Ryan Gander's largest institutional solo exhibition in Europe to date (Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, 5 December 2024 – 20 April 2025).

Rather than occupying a single essay position, the text is threaded through the volume at intervals, interleaving art-historical analysis with a sequence of epistles addressed to the artist and a closing suite of postscript 'Plates'. Analysis and first-person address are therefore encountered in alternation, in a structure that mirrors the distributive, non-linear logic of Gander's practice.

The research queries what forms of writing are adequate to an artistic practice organised around propositions that are never quite realised, and advances the epistle as a method of art-historical enquiry: a mode in which the writer's situated, embodied encounter is admitted as evidence rather than suppressed as bias. Through close analysis of works including There's a work in that! (2024), Staccato Refractions (2019–20), School of Languages (2023) and the Phantom Ambition series (2023–24), the text situates Gander's accumulated propositions within a genealogy of incompletable knowledge systems — Giulio Camillo's Theatre of Memory, Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, the withheld corpus of Hilma af Klint — and reads them through Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism, Donna Haraway's companion species, and Besant and Leadbeater's thought-forms.

The essay extends the author's concept of 'dreamwork', which they have been developing since 2018, placing it in dialogue with Gander's own term 'Culturefield'. The epistolary passages bring language acquisition, migration, neurodivergence and illness to bear on questions of semiotics and non-human language, positing a first language that is gestural, chromatic and affective. Seventeen gouache works on linen and paper, termed 'epistemic structures', were produced as part of the enquiry.

The text contributes to affect theory, autotheoretical and curatorial writing, and the study of the unrealised project, offering a transferable model for practice-led criticism.