Artist Statement
Yet words are human artifacts, are they not? Surely to speak, or to think in words, is necessarily to step back from the world’s presence into a purely human sphere of reflection? Such, precisely, has been our civilized assumption. But what if meaningful speech is not an exclusively human possession? What if the very language we now speak arose first in response to an animate, expressive world, as a stuttering reply not just to others of our species but to an enigmatic cosmos that already spoke to us in a myriad of tongues? (Abrams, 2010, p. 4)
Ba_ble is a body of works that explore moments where language is set loose. The sculptures and paintings in the series question the permeable boundaries of human speech by exploring instances where speech is a participatory engagement with the world, a corporeality of song. As a series, the works romp in the faltering of speech, delight in the non-descript, in a simple glottal noise, a yawn, a howl, growl or purr. They explore moments of silence, muteness and of linguistic animality. As a series, they invite playful participation with animality of language. Ba_ble challenges notions of intellectual superiority associated with human speech, assumptions that intelligence is measured by a stick understood to be human. This way of thinking follows a path where the closer a species comes to replicating human potential; the more we understand it as a form of “intelligent life”.
I began this project just over a year ago, with the hypotheses that my understanding of imagination could be altered or transformed by learning from the birds, in particular by learning from their profuse vocality. Over time, the project has shifted and become an opportunity for me to participate in imagining and understanding the beast of my own vocality and through that process to trust a fall from the interiority of ‘my’ self, of ‘my’ humanity, allowing me to stumble into the vast space where intuition meets language to form possibility… where the value of a gurgle lies not in its babbling potential of translation into ‘intellectual-human’ terms but rather in the delight of letting go...
Ba_ble is a body of works that explore moments where language is set loose. The sculptures and paintings in the series question the permeable boundaries of human speech by exploring instances where speech is a participatory engagement with the world, a corporeality of song. As a series, the works romp in the faltering of speech, delight in the non-descript, in a simple glottal noise, a yawn, a howl, growl or purr. They explore moments of silence, muteness and of linguistic animality. As a series, they invite playful participation with animality of language. Ba_ble challenges notions of intellectual superiority associated with human speech, assumptions that intelligence is measured by a stick understood to be human. This way of thinking follows a path where the closer a species comes to replicating human potential; the more we understand it as a form of “intelligent life”.
I began this project just over a year ago, with the hypotheses that my understanding of imagination could be altered or transformed by learning from the birds, in particular by learning from their profuse vocality. Over time, the project has shifted and become an opportunity for me to participate in imagining and understanding the beast of my own vocality and through that process to trust a fall from the interiority of ‘my’ self, of ‘my’ humanity, allowing me to stumble into the vast space where intuition meets language to form possibility… where the value of a gurgle lies not in its babbling potential of translation into ‘intellectual-human’ terms but rather in the delight of letting go...
