What must it be like not to be able to hear any sounds, to be deaf? You can still make sounds with your speech apparatus, but you can’t hear yourself. This piece is a homage to Alexander Melville Bell’s phonetic alphabet that he devised in 1867 to help deaf people articulate sounds correctly. He called this system of phonetic symbols “Visible Speech”. The  symbols correspond to each sound that is found in human speech as well as notations for tone, pitch and suction. Their shape mimics the position of the mouth when speaking the sounds out loud.

I used the original anatomical head drawing of Bell to show the speech apparatus and painted some of his symbols on fabric. Human interaction through speech and sound is so important, we sometimes forget that not everybody can hear us.

Visible Speech

20″ x 30″

hand dyed fabric (not by artist), oil paint sticks, acrylic paint, embroidery floss

painting, applique, hand- and machine stitching