How to Wear a Squid

When we hear someone speak in a language we don't know, we hear only sound. Words in a foreign language create a fictional world around us, we can only imagine the true meaning of these sounds. Learning a foreign language is the task of dismantling our reality and putting it back together in a new shape. The process of learning a language reveals characteristics of the language - its subjectivity, abstraction and arbitrariness.

My work takes language apart not according to etymology but by finding and creating images in the common combinations of letters that make up words. I started to work with nine prefixes to make a small prototype of this visual language. I constructed a number of words from each prefix. These words build on the prefix in different ways, producing many possible narratives. This prototype visual language is very constrained, but also has the potential to generate infinite forms and combinations.