A hand moves across a page holding a pen. The ink flows in patterns and shapes. Beautiful words emerge: you see their form and you read what they say. The two are one.

Judith was a dancer. Her childhood dream was to be in the ballet. At six she was offered a scholarship but was too young to leave home alone, and the family couldn’t be uprooted from the farm. Life had other plans.

In those days, farmers paid for everything with cheques. And a cheque requires a signature. It was the only thing her father wrote.

He had a beautiful signature. I’d sit and watch him, this kind of fluidity, the flow, the grace; that’s the only thing he wrote. It drew me in. After I had my children, I needed something else. I went to night school and started doing calligraphy. And it connected with me. I just loved it. I think that’s my father’s legacy to me.

A signature marks a transition in life. The time when you put your name to paper and it becomes a representation of you.

Judith guided a 15-year-old boy to develop his own signature. He described his writing as shocking. She looked at how he wrote and held a pen. From there, an hour later he had a signature. Together they had made something he could be proud of. Something he had that was his alone. His smile was ear to ear.

The paper is a stage. The pen is the actor and the ink is the dance.

Judith took this further. A performance concept using calligraphy. She was on stage, writing. The writing was projected onto a screen, and a dancer leapt through the strikes, strokes and loops of the letters as they were written. Words, music and dance.

Judith’s favourite ink is sumi, from Japan. It’s a made from a mixture of soot from lamp oil or pinewood, animal glue and perfume. It is solidified into sticks or cakes, which are scraped or ground on an ink slab, mixed with water and applied with a brush.

Pens and brushes and inks are selected for the purpose they serve. The style of writing to be adopted. Each letter of an alphabet has to be mastered. It may take six months; that is the craft and the art.

A signature, a poem, a thank you note. In Judith’s hand these become singular, special, memorable.