Statement
For the past fifteen years my work has explored the ways conversation and conversational discourse might be represented as a visual experience: most people know what a conversation sounds like, but what does a conversation look like? What if we were able to look at the world with the sound turned off? What would this world reveal?
This is the privilege of being deaf, and of making from a disabling condition an enabling experience. When people who do not know sign language talk with me, I explain that I am deaf and ask them to write – a mode of communication that is simple without being simplistic, and generally inclusive. But what gets written is often quite unlike writing in the usual sense: there are gaps, crossed-out words, drawing, lines, all of which looks less like writing that it does talking on paper. It is by using these scraps of paper on which people have written notes, names, or phrases in order to 'converse' with me that I make much of my art, using such scraps of conversations to make wall pieces, books, and table-top tableaux that all take as their subject matter the ineluctable differences between speech and writing, and reading and listening.
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