Text Festival Bury

Abstract

For Text Festival, Stawarska-Beavan produced a set of 3 screen-prints entitled Transliteration. The work investigated how ethereality of sound, speech and passage of time can be translated into a two-dimensional visual image, and brings printmaking practice, new media and interactive element together.

Using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) text and graphical elements such as a grid and gradations of lines, numerous subtle marks on black paper and elaborate typographical arrangements engaged viewers visually to decipher phonetic bilingual text, but the IPA obstructs the reading process; the text is coded. The viewer looks for familiarities in the text, but to break the code he/she must produce the sounds out loud; hearing their own voice as they decode the narrative.