Imogen Stidworthy
Imogen Stidworthy What happens to language and sense-making in encounters with unfamiliar or even unknowable forms of voicing? What different forms of relationship and understanding emerge in the spaces between languages? My work grapples with the impossibility of glimpsing language from the outside.
It takes the form of films, sound works and multi-part installations involving sound, video, sculptural and technological elements. I engage with these questions through encounters with people whose relationship with language is in some sense radically affected, whether by life experiences, cultural practices (shamanism, ventriloquy), neurological or physical conditions (aphasia, non-verbal autism).
My current work engages with relationship between verbal and non-verbal being and involves people who have no practice of language at all. This is the focus of doctoral research I am now completing in the framework of the PhD programme (faculty of Visual Arts) at Lund University (SE) and my dissertation, 'Voicing on the Borders of Language'.