The Art of Signing Hands

Available for over a year

Curator Emma Fearon guides us around her BSL and English bilingual art exhibition Speaker 1 (00:01): Listen, it's quite noisy on Paris street today. There's a siren there's traffic. There's people inside the make tank gallery. Things are really quite different. This is the exhibition, the art of signing hands. Emma Fearon is the curator. Speaker 2 (00:25): This show came out of my MA that I'm currently doing where we had to put on an exhibition. And I sort of just wanted to kind of develop my dissertation for my undergrad, that focused on DVA deaf visualization art. And basically it's really just about working with the arts, create a space that represents the community the art is talking about. Speaker 1 (00:45): So tell us about that community. Speaker 2 (00:47): It's community, very close to my heart as I'm actually a coda (child of deaf adults) and my parents were both born deaf. So I grew up with many deaf adults in my life, and I's hard to kind of put into words, but the community really means, I mean, it's not really worth saying in words, it's better to sign about it. <laugh> but, um, it is the community that raised me. Speaker 1 (01:05): So how does that manifest in terms of the art that we see and this exhibition here? Well, Speaker 2 (01:12): For this exhibition kind of idea was bilingual. I was trying to prioritize communication for deaf people first, but also equally other people can come and learn and see what beautiful language it is. Speaker 1 (01:24): Yeah. It's fascinating to me because I don't sign, but I'm seeing screens all around me with people signing and already I'm conscious that this is definitely a, a bilingual world. Speaker 2 (01:38): So yeah. So here you can actually see both American sign language and British language. Speaker 1 (01:42): Who's created the art and what does it tell us? Speaker 2 (01:45): Here we have Louise Stern, Nancy Rourke and Chella Man through incredible artists. Nancy's primarily a painter. Louise is also an author and a filmmaker. Then we also have Chella Man in the cinema room. Speaker 1 (01:58): What does it mean to you to have brought these artists together and to have told their story through multiple languages, including British Sign Language? Speaker 2 (02:11): Um, I mean, it just feels great. It feels like the way it should be done. To be honest, I am very passionate just about accessibility. You need to go that a step further and it's about making people feel comfortable. It's not just the bare minimum. You need to really bring everyone and make everyone know that it's their space, it's their place to just feel at ease. And that was the aim of bringing all the languages like, well, not all the mainly BSL or the interpretations in BSL, but it's just that easy viewing, you know? And I mean, that's what the art's asking for. Anyway, Speaker 1 (02:40): <laugh>, this is a piece by Nancy Rourke. It's called the Second Wave of Milan. Why? Speaker 2 (02:49): Um, I picked this piece because I mean, Nancy is just incredible at representing deaf histories in a really impassioned, bold, fearless kind of way. And, um, what what's being referred to in this painting is the Congress of Milan of 1880, where sign language was banned by hearing doctors and Nancy just represents it so well where we have a big triangle in the middle, which is, um, meant to be the Bermuda triangle of where everything was lost. And you have figures on the floor with their hands missing. Speaker 1 (03:19): So it looks back to a time when sign language was banned in 1880, we live in a very different time now, but how different is it really for this community? Speaker 2 (03:32): I mean, everyone has different experiences and I am a hearing person. I can't speak for the community, but growing up within it, things are getting better. I mean, BSL was recognized legally as a language this year. What that means is it has the same rights as a language of the country. So now we're protected, but you know, still, always, still far more to do.