Description
Outline (for G.A.), 2020
Yes, I can hear you loud and clear
When I decided to tell the story of my first years living in Germany—of the places I have been and things I have seen—I chose to invent my own language. It’s not a language of words, but of experience translated into shapes. To find the shapes for my language I consulted the photographs and drawings I have made since I moved to Europe, this archive of things I have noticed. Each shape represents an architectural form or object from public space in a simple expression, complexities reduced to two dimensions. A Parisian chimney is a rectangle with a shallow bend halfway along its length. The arch over a window at the art school in Leipzig is an elongated semicircle. A concrete ashtray outside a museum in Berlin is two triangles balancing atop each other.
I think of the large wall hangings in this body of work as fabric collages. They are inspired by signal flags, which are used to send signals at a distance, mostly at sea. Like signal flags, these works use simple combinations of colours and shapes to communicate complex information and messages. They are the flags for my days and months of settling into life in Europe. They are flags as journal entries, flags that I am waving, flags that say: I am listening, I am trying to be understood, I wish to communicate with you.
