Alphabet
Early in 2020 when the US and much of the world collectively hunkered down to protect against the pandemic, I began to draw the latin alphabet. Initially, it was an exercise in mark-making. I didn’t know know where it would lead me. My work has always alluded to my physical body in some form and in this instance, I thought I’d challenge myself to write with both my dominant left hand and my very non-dextrous right hand, interested to see how a loss of control could abstract and unexpectedly shift the visual field as well as my own visual language.
But then as the year of social isolation continued and the daily news reports that were my constant soundtrack kept revealing a growing dissonance between fact and fiction, I found myself thinking deeply about communication and the nature and evolution of language. As the letters flowed from my hands to the page, forwards and backwards on repeat, they too seemed to evolve in much the same way as the world’s alphabets have done so through civilizations. Each drawing became a conversation with its own resonance. I feel a letter or character in any alphabet contains possibilities; a past, a future, compassion and connection, alienation and the potential for misunderstanding. In the words of Victor Hugo “Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet”.