Lately I’ve been exploring Sensory Loss

One of my projects ‘Being in my Shoes’ is about putting the audience in my shoes and experiencing hearing loss themselves. This work is inspired by Javier Tellez’s film, Letter on the Blind Side, which features an elephant and 6 blind people from New York. This project is not to highlight my deafness, but to explore our individual experiences of reality and how they are governed by our senses. Reality experienced by myself is different to that of a blind and hearing person. I’m interested in our experiences and how we perceive the world. For example my sense of smell is higher than that of a hearing person. My world is a visual world. I read body language and I can ‘see’ sounds. I’m also interested in how quickly we adapt to the loss of a sense.

I’ve invited a group of people to participate in a series of activities. One member will be hearing impaired and will be introduced to the group. (They may all know each other or they may be strangers) The group will be given a task in which they all have an individual role to play. The activity forces the group to interact with each other and develop new ways of communicating in order to get the task completed. I have quite a few people sighed up for this, but it’s a big project that needs planning! Watch this space.

AT the moment planning a series of 5 daily installations based on a piece of text written by myself called ‘The Girl with Wooden Ears’, who goes off in search for sound. The text is written in a similar style to that of a fairy tale.

These installations are planned for May 9th so lots to do to organise this. The installations will feature audio, projectors and weird fabric sculptures. I will keep you updated on this. Today I’m off to Maplins to buy speaker cones and wiring etc for the audio. I’m making the speakers myself and hanging them from the ceiling.

Advertisement