Helen Keller, 2024

 

This group of works developed from archival images of the American author and activist Helen Keller. As narrated in her first autobiography, Keller lost both sight and hearing in infancy. At age six the realm of language and the possibility of conceptual communication was patiently unfolded to her through touch, through hands.

Keller's coming into language dramatises the miraculous nature of language acquisition more broadly. Initially, these works were my way to dwell within this marvel, as well as upon the moving beauty of Keller's narrative and my longstanding interest in the unfamilar configurations of the visible and the invisible. The works themselves, however, opened wider connections, ranging from the development of the telephone—the first technology to separate the voice from presence—to the destruction of Hiroshima at the dawn of the atomic age.