ĄĘŻĆĘŻĄŁ

This is a story how language affects our ways of looking at the world. At the centre of the fabric, I embroidered an eye with a wide-open mouth set into it. Polish letters with diacritic signs swirl around the iris. ĄĘŻĆĘŻĄŁ. The edges of the fabric are decorated with ornamentation composed of letters from the Ukrainian alphabet, ґ1, and я2, which allude to the history of the birth of the Ukrainian language, the changes to the Cyrillic script and Ukraine's breakaway from Russia to become independent. What emerges here is the tension between the uniqueness of alphabets and their plasticity and fluctuation. The embroidered utterances touch on the experience whereby, when someone speaks in a foreign language, it has an impact on how they are perceived by those around them and on the emotions directed towards them. A foreign accent betrays our otherness and, received negatively, has the power of exclusion. Language is the basis not only of communication, but also of our perceptions. It is a tool for building relationships with the world. It can bring us closer to it, but it can also distance us. Language assimilates and differentiates.