Not long ago I entered The 9th Helen Keller International Award aimed at deafblind or had a sensory impairment that inspires discussion and encourages an exploration and celebration of the senses.
I decided to use my personal feelings and taste what it is like living in a hearing world and sometimes I am lost in this world due to lack of information not been clearly explained to me. My work is about how I communicate everyday through my hearing aids with lipreading, without either hearing aids or lipreading I would find it very hard to communicate with other normal hearing people. I have the feeling of living in 3 worlds the hearing world, hard of hearing world and the deaf world. My attitude of communicating in each world is different, I prefer the deaf world as it is easy for me to communicate and I do not feeling under any stress. I speak perfect English due to my mother putting in an awful lot of effort in teaching me for more than 10 years how to speak when I was young.
I will occasionally find it very hard to know where the sounds are coming from and I usally check over my shoulders, look around to see. I have been told that normal hearing people know where the sound is coming from without moving their head around. Generally most deaf people would use their eyes more than their ears to make up for hearing sense and my work is based on this.
My idea for this massive 36 x 36 inkjet print comes from Chuck Close and Andy Warhol. I repeated the image of hearing aids many times over because I wear them everyday apart from going to bed when I can take them off. Yes, I sleep without hearing any sound, but I can feel vibration sound sometimes.
I researched into digital colour sounds but I always feel that yellow is the loudest sound and black is dead, absolutely no sound. I lipread due to that I cannot hear the vowel and consonant sounds maybe one or two words I might pick up clearly between 4 to 5 sentences, but mostly I hear is sounds but sometimes I try to force myself to pick up audio speaking sound but it is almost impossible. I have more hearing in one ear than the other and cannot hear high notes but mostly middle and low notes. I used colours to represent the vowels, consonants, high, middle and low sound. I draw up a colour chart how I feel how I hear through my digital hearing aids and it took me a long time to create it.
As I am wearing digital hearing aids and I think of myself as digital printmaker. I am aware that many artists are still against computer as a way to express an idea, but for me it is another tool that I can express and idea that may not be possible in traditional media and a different way to communicate my work on paper.
I do not just print on paper but carry out research and tests and that no two same paper and different inkjet printers produce the same result. The application to experiment with a wide range of papers including transfer paper, rice paper and apply mix media application liquids is enormous in fact you can print onto metal by apply the right application through an inkjet printer. I discovered that I like to do screen printing on top of an inkjet print.
