Abstracted ASL

This particular body of work I hold as some of the most personal, vulnerable, time consuming and inventive. Language ends up in all my work: lyrics, photos, posters, small sculptures and standard word to page writing. In this series I am the letter by referencing sign language in an image capture to create short, crisp, poems. I used the scanning option on a standard, at home, HP All in One printer.

Each letter gets six image captures – and within that at least 10 versions. A light and a dark image were captured for: one hand, two hands, and me in the image. I do not sign and some of the letter images are quite abstracted. The scanning techniques are refined considering light, motion and depth. They are captured in real time, with no post capture editing, using the low end scanner. There are some standard ‘poses’ for lettering to access a constant graphical lexicon.

The ‘poems’ are exceedingly short-with a repetition of letters to highlight the diversity of the images and emotional variation of the placement of letters.

I wish near the time of producing this work I had generated more images of letters for more to work with in ‘writing’ word poems. I don’t see anyway I’ll get back to it – well with this process anyway.

It is very expensive to print as each image element as separate and printed on a light foam core in order to hang. The individual letter panels are are than 6” wide.

The highlit piece ‘…her name…’ has shown three juried shows including a RISD alumni show. Please feel free to send questions, comments, or an interest in collecting this work.