Living Museums – Perth

Artwork 1: Lost in translation

Lost in translation was a concept that I had been thinking about for quite a number of years and was finally able to pull the pieces together and create awareness for this topic. When I was asked “what am I passionate about?”, it admittedly took me quite a time to land on one singular topic; so I choose communication.

As vague as it sounds, I purposely narrowed it down to this description – “phrases and terms lost through time and appropriated without prior knowledge to its origin.” This began when I was still in high school in a history class with a new teacher; the topic was the Atlantic slave trade. He had highlighted the term “nittygritty” and what its origins were. The origins were debated in many articles I had resourced, but all had the same connotations of harrowing slave treatment.

Throughout the years after, I had noticed the term was universally used even in established companies and television channels. This term had stuck with me all my life and was astounded at how little people knew what it meant in my circle of friends. A few articles I had read made some comments along the lines of “should this even be an issue now? It’s just being pick” – this is a very loose translation of the article itself.

I had then begun to research other colloquial terms and their meanings; then the list grew – uppity, peanut gallery, rule of thumb and many more.

My final designs were to demonstrate how easy it is nowadays to research quite literally anything online and how I was able to discover these words and their disturbing origins. I believe that the origins of language and words are so incredibly important and invaluable, taking a bit of history back into our own hands and becoming a bit more self aware. It can help influence the way we interact and socialise in society; and how we may influence others.

Artwork 2: Accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing people

I've been passionate about increasing accessibility for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people for several years, since I realised just how much media was inaccessible to them, especially on the internet. I was really outraged when I heard that YouTube was removing community-generated captions, since it's helped a lot of its videos to be enjoyed by people with hearing impairments.

It's also frustrating to me when creators don't subtitle their own content, because it's so easy to and it shows that you care about the hearing impaired. It was that frustration with both YouTube itself and ignorant content creators that led me to make this piece.

Artwork 3: We are equal

I created my artwork to protest people's dismissive attitudes on sexual harassment and assault towards women. I feel strongly about this topic as I have been personally affected by it, as have most of the women in my life.

When many people speak out on this issue, they are met with angry voices about the generalisation of men, rather than anger directed towards what some men are actually doing. I believe this needs to change.