Ferguson’s early works were language-based, type-written text on paper. Always in search of a system that took the personal or aesthetic leanings out of work, Ferguson began by typing lists of words, including overt editorial marks. Eventually, he began painting letters, winnowing out all letters with proscribed architectural quality. His criteria rejected curves and a capacity to produce a self-defining structure through repetition, settling on H, X, I, and L. Using a single 4” letter stencil as a fundamental block, he produced laid out grids of letters in black enamel spray paint. Following the text-based paintings, Ferguson began on a series of dot paintings made from that most basic element of punctuation, the period. To produce repeated periods, he used common plaster corner beading to create a spray paint stencil, thereby conflating the period with a utilitarian object. This kind of bond and transformation between rarified conceptual practice and humble objects came to inform all of Ferguson’s subsequent work.