Artist's statement
Full Artist's statement
My work plays with the ideas of translation, interpretation, and the complexities of language. In this body of work, I take small nuances of speech—turns of phrase, words that have multiple meanings, and the varying ways we interpret them—and abstract them beyond recognition by translating them into Morse code and knitting the transcription row by row with yarn. Though each piece originates in English phrases often understood only by the most fluent speakers, the viewer experience is equal. The resulting amorphous shapes act as visual representations of the intricacies of communication.
I aim to create a space where visitors are challenged to think about language in a way we aren’t used to experiencing it; visually, but also tactilely—by using the knit and purl stitches to represent sounded and silent beats respectively in Morse code, the works are given a braille-like surface.
Additionally, I hope to draw attention to the complexity of everyday speech. The ease with which we communicate daily can be taken for granted; what I hope to achieve by dedicating hours to the translation and transformation of single sentences is to emphasize the profound feat that is modern language.
