Affordance as boundary

I have contributed a chapter (9) to this terrific volume on intersemiotic translation, edited by Ricarda Vidal and Madeleine Campbell. Translating Across Sensory and Linguistic Borders is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Available from all good bookshops.

snowflake generation

My English language translation of Paul Scott’s British Sign Language poem Snowflake of Hope was published in Modern Poetry in Translation’s Slap Bang issue.

sign language poetry

I was delighted to join BSL Poet Laureate Kabir Kapoor to discuss the nature and future of sign language poetry. The original discussion, in BSL, appears on The Poetry Society’s website, with my abridged translation appearing in The Poetry Review, 13:4 pp: 75-87.

Signart: (British) sign language poetry as Gesamtkunstwerk

My PhD (University of Bristol, 2014) explores the phenomenon of poetry in British Sign Language. Whilst previous scholars have examined the form from literary and linguistic perspectives, my work addresses the visual properties of sign languages as they are exploited creatively. The study situates current understandings of sign language poetry, tracing the influences of ocularcentrism and logocentrism on the discipline of Deaf Studies. 'Sign language poetry' is then re-contextualised through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Derridean grammatology to emerge as 'Signart' - the performed and performative, visual, and embodied art form of sign language communities.

In addition to examining the theoretical frameworks through which academic, literary, and artistic institutions might perceive and encounter it, Signart is explored through interviews with Signartists, their audiences, and those who have not previously been exposed to Signart. A pilot translation of a Signartwork uncovers the significance of image in the form and leads to the adoption of a/r/tography as a research method involving art practices, research, and translation. A collection of visual artists is established to examine image in a core sample of four Signartworks, and further data is collected through two public events staged at the Royal West of England Academy. The results of these investigations suggest Signart as not only blended acts of literature and drawing (here called illumination), but also of gesture-dance, compositional rhythm, and cinematic properties which effect a social sculpture of deafhood within signing communities.

The unique blend of artforms within Signart invites comparison with the concerns of the modernist project; with ideas of synthesis, of synaesthesia, and particularly of Gesamtkunstwerk. To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an expanded understanding of Signart, the thesis draws on art epistemology and the ideas and works of a number of modernist and post-modernist artists - notably Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joseph Beuys.

The entire thesis is available here.