My work explores the aesthetic possibilities of language via its symbols and marks. Language is primarily a tool we use to communicate, but if taken out of this utilitarian context, a language’s letters, numbers, signs, and marks have graphic qualities that can serve as building blocks for visual art.

I use manual typewriters and ribbons with various ink colors to create works on paper and fabric. Sometimes I focus on the pictorial aspects of a single letter through patterns, other times I repeat words or phrases until new shapes emerge, and other times still I overlay punctuation to create scenes evocative of landscapes. Manual typewriters have certain limitations (they only have so many characters; their carriages can only accommodate paper of a certain width), but to me these are opportunities to create things their designers might not have imagined (even though typewriter art has been around practically since typewriters were a thing).

In my typewritten pieces I use language in different ways than I have as a poet, teacher, insurance broker, publisher, or conversationalist. I break it down into its component parts and rearrange these into new forms that supplement or replace old meanings with new ones.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggests our native language determines the way we perceive the world. As a native English speaker, I know that a sentence’s syntax is fundamental to its meaning, and that a rearranged syntax creates a different meaning. My typewriter art engages in linguistic rearrangements to alter viewers’ perceptions of what language is for and how it can be used. Most of the typewriters I use to make my art have English alphabets, but I also use others with Arabic, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets, giving me new symbols, new understandings, new possibilities to pursue.