New Piece in the Works

"In the works" is a convenient multi-purpose phrase which encompasses anything and everything from "floating around somewhere in my brain like blobs of that stuff inside of a lava lamp" to "partly finished and coming along nicely."  In this case, I guess both of those descriptions apply to some degree.

I think about language a lot, because I teach kids who have language deficits, mostly in the areas of reading and writing.  They also have poor vocabularies, and generally don't express themselves well in any context.  And I was wondering what factors influence the development of the parts of the brain that process language, which led me to pondering the original development of language in early humans.  I've also been thinking about the word "palimpsest" lately, sparked by Robyn's recent post on Art Propelled; before that, I had read about the "The World is a Town" mail art project, based on the Novgorod Codex.  It occurred to me that there are parallels between my work and the concept of the palimpsest, since my pieces often involve applying layers and scraping them off, leaving traces of each previous layer beneath the next.

These were some of my lava blobs.  Eventually they began to bump into one another, combine, and take on a form, which at this point looks something like this:

Palimpsest: Language

It is the cover of a typing text book from 1938.  So far, it has been scratched, scraped, and painted; many types of writing, printing, and maps have been glued on, scraped off, and transferred.  This is the bottom part of the piece, and it still has a ways to go.  More progress will be posted as it comes.