Deaf Aesthetics

My brother and I stood before a map on a billboard in the grassy grounds of Gallaudet University, the world’s largest tertiary institution for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.1 It was the summer break and the campus was empty. We craned our necks, looking for the administration building, and tried to match it to a hand-drawn map in my notebook. 

A man approached us. ‘What are you looking for?’ he signed and spoke. 

I showed him my map, pointing to the Welcome Center.

He pointed down the road. We smiled and nodded, heading in the direction of his finger. 

In the building, I approached the desk. Although I know a few Auslan signs, I know nothing of American Sign Language. A woman behind the desk, noticing my hesitancy, said, ‘It’s okay, I can speak.’  

I introduced myself and explained I was from Australia and that I had emailed previously. ‘We’d like to have a look at the campus.’   

She gave me a printed map and pointed out where to start.

The college was established in 1864 on grounds that were donated by philanthropist, lawyer and journalist Amos Kendall, who had noticed that a number of deaf and blind children in the Washington, D.C. area were not getting the education they needed. It was initially a school – the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind. Its head, Edward Miner Gallaudet, was the youngest son of Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who in 1817 co-founded America’s first institution for deaf education, the Connecticut Asylum (at Hartford) for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. From 1863 to 1864, college-level courses were offered, and in 1864, the institution was authorised to award degrees. 

Prior to entering the campus, my brother and I had met architect Hansel Bauman in a café. Bauman was one of the developers of DeafSpace, the goal of which, he explains in a YouTube documentary, is to ‘try to codify this amazing idea that Deaf experience could live in architecture’. Over coffee, Bauman told us that ‘Deaf people have an innate sense of space’. I thought of signing, and how the placement of hands in relation to the body changes the meaning or emphasis of a word, and how, when I enter a room, I immediately check the sources of light and whether the floor is carpeted. I like small, intimate spaces where I can see what is happening. 

Bauman talked through his approach to DeafSpace as he drew the map in my notebook, pointing out the buildings we should visit on the campus. He told us to start at College Hall, an early iteration of DeafSpace. Now, as we entered, the corridors seemed luminous. We browsed the information about Gallaudet’s history on the walls, then headed out to the garden, a green leafy triangle bordered by two walls. It is a classic example of DeafSpace, Bauman explained, because the deaf person can stand with their back to a wall and see all that is before them, and need not be anxious about missing something behind them. In Chapel Hall, the next building, the windows are taller on the north side than on the south, allowing light to become soft and diffuse. When light is too bright, it creates shadows on a person’s face and hands, which makes it difficult to lipread or interpret sign language.  

DeafSpace, as a theoretical concept, emerged at Gallaudet when a collective of Deaf students realised that their campus environment didn’t really evoke Deaf identity or experience. Todd Byrd, writing on DeafSpace in Gallaudet Today: the Magazine (a piece reprinted in Jos Boys’ Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader), explains how students on the James Lee Sorenson Language and Communications Center (SLCC) Planning Committee began to hold discussions, collaborating with two professors of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University – Ben Bahan and H. Dirksen L. Bauman – and Dirksen’s brother Hansel. They developed a course on DeafSpace to articulate its precepts, and students began drafting designs. Their collaborative efforts led to the building of the SLCC. 

My brother and I left College Hall and walked through the early summer day, across the campus to the SLCC. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows stretched up three floors. The height and light reminded me of cathedrals.

A lift moved between the floors. Deaf people have died from being caught in lifts, because when they pressed the intercom for help, they couldn’t hear someone giving instructions. To remedy this, the SLCC’s lift was glass, allowing those outside to see deaf people signing for help.  

On the far side of the room, a circular bench curved around the floor like a comma. Byrd refers in his essay to Matthew Malzkuhn, who researched deaf homeowners who designed new homes or renovated existing ones. Malzkuhn observes that deaf people are ‘spherical people […] We converse in a circle, we arrange ourselves in a circle’ – because we need to see faces and hands to communicate. 

I imagined the students facing one another in the room, light illuminating their faces, or sitting on the curved bench, reading a person on the other side of the curve. Looking at the light pouring in, I felt my heart open. 

In the evening, my brother and I sat on the hotel’s roof terrace for drinks. I was trying to finish some work with my G&T. Around us, the bar filled with deaf people signing.  

‘What are all these deaf people doing here?’ my brother asked the bartender. 

‘I don't know,’ she replied. ‘I've never seen so many deaf people.’ 

It seemed serendipitous that they should be there when I had come to Washington, D.C. for my research, but more likely there was simply a large Deaf community in the city due to the presence of Gallaudet University, and it is seen as a Deaf-friendly city (for the present at least).

I watched the Deaf group between breaks in my work, trying to pick up stories from their faces. 

As the sky darkened (if I stood on tiptoes to look over the barriers, I could see the Capitol lit up in the distance), one man crouched by the floor lights with his phone to sign, so that his listener had enough light to read his hands and face on his video chat. 

Deaf culture focusses on community and connection to counteract the isolation that we frequently experience, whether from being cut off from our families or from hearing people who do not take care to communicate with us. Byrd refers to architecture in Deaf culture ‘as the third person’, a metaphor that alludes to the way that, when deaf people are out walking, a designated ‘third person’ will look out for hazards, such as gutters coming up or cars driving towards them, which they cannot see if they are concentrating on lips and hands. When a building is the third person, it nurtures its occupants. For example, rounded corners allow deaf people to see who is coming (for we cannot hear footsteps approaching), and shallow steps reduce the likelihood of tripping when reading someone’s face and hands.

When I encountered the novels of deaf Australian writer Patricia Carlon, I found myself thinking of the careful, considered building by the Deaf community and its allies at Gallaudet University. I noticed a contrast between Gallaudet’s architecture, which facilitates connection and care, and the alienation and disconnection found in Carlon’s work. Her evocation of cramped, dark spaces gestures to her experience of entrapment in a culture that dismissed and denigrated her deafness.

Carlon was born in 1927 near Wagga Wagga, and the family moved to Homebush when she was small. At age eleven she became profoundly deaf ‘overnight’, according to her nephew. Instant, profound deafness – having no, or very little, hearing – would have been a shock. Later, the family moved to Bexley, where Carlon lived next door to her parents in a duplex. While her sister worked in a bank, Carlon began writing for an income. By her twenties, she was publishing short romances in Australian magazines and writing longer thrillers, but she was unable to find an Australian publisher for the latter. In biographical notes accompanying her novels, Carlon states that the local publishing industry was only interested in ‘police procedural stuff’, or how policemen or women work together to solve crimes. Carlon’s novels feature children or young women trying to extricate themselves from danger, while their concerned friends, family or partners work out where they are.

In 1956, Carlon connected with John Johnson, a new London literary agent, and in 1961 published her first novel, Circle of Fear. This was followed by another thirteen novels between 1962 and 1970. In Australia, her novels continued to be ignored until Adelaide academics Michael Tolley and Peter Moss, founders of the Wakefield Crime Series, republished The Whispering Wall in 1992 and The Souvenir in 1993. New York publisher Laura Hruska subsequently republished nine of Carlon’s novels in the United States, with Publishers Weekly in 1996 comparing her writing to Patricia Highsmith’s. Translations of Carlon’s work were published – in German, Dutch, French, Swedish, and Japanese. Michael Heyward, publisher at Text Publishing, then found Carlon‘s novels on Soho Press’ lists in Hruska’s office and republished two of them in Australia. Crime of Silence and The Unquiet Night were re-released in 2002, the year that Carlon died.

Following Carlon’s death, literary critic Susan Wyndham wrote that the knowledge of her impairment ‘came as a surprise to everyone else who knew “Miss Carlon”, from her long-time London agent and her publishers in Melbourne and New York’. Carlon’s nephew recounted to me how, when he visited Carlon’s bank to resolve her finances following her death, the bank teller was taken aback that Carlon was deaf. Carlon had only ever spoken to this particular employee, her nephew said, and added that this did not surprise him, because she had a very ‘mobile mouth’, and lipreading would have been easier with this employee than others.

Wyndham also noted, in the same article, that although Carlon did not write ‘explicitly about deafness, her books are often set in small, isolated towns or empty houses, and among their characters are a blind woman, another paralysed by a stroke and a child locked in a kitchen after her babysitter is murdered. In The Unquiet Night (1965), a woman is imprisoned in a vault where she can hear nothing.’ Publisher Michael Heyward observed to Wyndham that, once he learned of Carlon's deafness, ‘you can’t read her fiction in the same way. She tells stories about children who are unable to make adults understand what's going on and her narratives create portraits of claustrophobic environments that pertain to what we now know about her’. 

Silence is not usually a problem for deaf people. Indeed, Carlon’s characters tend to associate silence with security. In The Running Woman (1966), Carlon contrasts the protagonist Gabriel’s need for silence with her husband’s desire for noise, indicating their incompatibility. When Nicholas shows Gabriel the house he has bought, in a new suburb freshly cleared of bush, she wonders ‘how could one say to a man that his dream was her nightmare – that her idea of home was a mellow place, a small place, a place where one entertained a few friends at quiet dinners; not a showplace with a thirty-five foot living-room whose length of polished wood flooring cried out for crowded parties’. When Nicholas says, ‘I couldn’t live in a silent place’, Gabriel replies, ‘I couldn’t live in perpetual noise.’  

Meanwhile, in The Souvenir (1970), a young woman, Sandra, plans to go hitchhiking. Sandra has been protected and sheltered by her family and, while she wants to venture out on her own, she is unsure how she will manage. In the bathrooms of Central Station in Sydney, she meets Peta, who is bold and worldly, and accepts her invitation to travel together. However, Sandra is soon overwhelmed by Peta’s verbosity, and ‘wasn’t sure that she wanted to hike through the days ahead with the older girl at her side – talking all the time’. Later, when they have hitchhiked south, with Peta pulling on a clown’s costume to make them entertaining to drivers, ‘Sandra’s head was spinning with tiredness and the babble of talk. With Peta there was never silence, aloneness’. The volume of Peta’s chatter only impacts on Sandra; it isn’t mentioned by Peta's family as something annoying, nor is it commented on by the novel’s detective. When Sandra observes that ‘Peta talked too much’, I recognise the exhaustion that comes from lipreading, which requires vast reserves of concentration.  

It is a lack of light, not silence, that can generate fear for deaf people. In The Unquiet Night, the protagonist, Rachel Penghill, inadvertently witnesses an attempted murder. The criminal finds out where she lives and traps her in the strong room in which she, a jewellery craftsperson, keeps her precious stones. Rachel is confined in the dark vault for nearly half the novel. Initially she has a flicker of light from a cigarette lighter. She bangs on the door for hours and, as she starts running out of air, she uses her stiletto heel to dig a hole in the brick wall. After a few days, Rachel’s love interest, Stephen, pieces together what has happened and gets to the vault before she expires from a lack of oxygen and water. 

In The Running Woman, Gabriel is suspected of running away from a drowning girl. As her community ensnares her in an ever-tightening noose of gossip, Gabriel runs into the bush and falls into a well. She finds a foothold on a ‘pedestal of stone’ and, looking up at the sky, she ‘saw first fully blackness, then greyness, then blackness again’, while water from a storm fills the well up to her chest. Meanwhile, in Hush, It’s a Game (1967), a little girl is left in the care of a neighbour over Christmas. The neighbour turns out to have once run a criminal enterprise, and her former partner arrives after being released from jail. The neighbour locks the girl in the kitchen, and the girl tries a range of tactics to get people’s attention, such as waving at neighbours and writing ‘Help’ on a piece of paper, which she sticks in the window, but she is assumed to be playing a game. When the phone rings, the girl cries, ‘Please come and let me out. Let me out! I’m locked in here, I wasn’t waving for fun. I wanted you to come and let me out.’ Eventually, the concerned neighbours work their way into the apartment and find the girl. 

These representations of small, dark spaces and locked rooms evoke entrapment, especially when compared to the airy, light-filled architecture of Gallaudet University. It becomes apparent that Carlon’s representations speak to the way that she, like many other deaf people, can feel isolated in a society in which their perspectives and experiences are marginalised. While the title of Wyndham’s 2002 article about Carlon – ‘Ace thriller trapped in a silent world’ – suggests that Carlon was imprisoned by her deafness, it was not her hearing loss that trapped her. Rather, it was Australian culture’s inability to value, connect to, and communicate with deaf people. 

When my brother and I arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art to see Christine Sun Kim’s exhibition All Day All Night, the computer terminals were down. My brother spoke to a woman at the desk while I stood beside him. He laughed and, as we walked away, he asked, ‘Did you hear what she said?’

I shook my head.

‘She said Saturn was in retrograde.’

I laughed too, and we turned into the exhibits on the ground floor. The exhibition’s title refers to Kim’s preoccupations and the fact that she can’t turn off her brain. She explains that the title ‘speaks to how I work, how I function, how I keep going. And it also speaks to the idea of obsession […] I’m always thinking about sound, social norms, deafness – I have things in my mind all the time, all day all night.’

Kim and her sister were born deaf to South Korean parents and grew up in California. Kim’s work gravitates around sound, explains Mary Ceruti and Scott Rothkopf in the volume accompanying the exhibition – ‘how it operates, how it is experienced both visually and bodily and, crucially, its political implications’. She uses diagrams, video, musical notations, installation, and humour to ‘reconsider the primacy placed on sound’ and to contemplate and engage with the nuances of deafness and Deaf culture.  

For me, the most engaging aspects of Kim’s work are its faces. In the first room that my brother and I entered, on the ground floor near the entrance, we watched two screens in the exhibit Looky Looky. They showed a series of short videos in which Kim and her husband, Thomas Mader, use expressions, the direction of their gaze, and the angle of their heads to communicate. These gestures are ‘non-manual markers’, that is, communication without sign. My brother and I were amused by the clear, wry expressions and the American Sign Language translations into English via subtitles. We understood those faces effortlessly. They were, after all, part of our family’s linguistics. Although, genetically, we are indeed a bunch of extraverts, there is another reason for this kind of expressive storytelling in our family: to make me laugh.  

Upstairs, I gravitated toward an exhibit titled When I Play the Deaf Card. A hand-drawn, slightly wobbly circle is divided into segments of different widths, each labelled with statements such as ‘To avoid getting stopped by charity workers in the street’, ‘To yell at assholes in my most deaf voice’, ‘To cut the line for rides at Disneyland’, ‘To cut the line at the Eiffel Tower’, ‘To cut the line at nightclubs’, ‘For a free extra tour ticket at a salt mine for my “interpreter” husband’. 

‘Ha, look at that!’ I exclaimed to my brother, pointing towards the work. ‘That’s what I do!’  

When I turned back to my brother, I saw from his face that something was amiss. A security guard stood close by, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. 

I looked to my brother, who explained, ‘You’re too close to the work.’ 

I stepped back immediately, ashamed for having done something wrong. 

A few days later, I met up with Deaf academic Brenda Jo Brueggemann at the New Britain Museum of American Art. She had texted me en route, concerned she would be late, because the No Kings protests were gathering in the cities. I told her not to worry. We’d had issues ourselves earlier – a flat battery in our Budget rental. My brother had had to ask the Airbnb host’s daughter for some jump leads, which she’d found in her father’s shed. 

Over coffee, at the gallery, we talked about Christine Sun Kim’s exhibition. ‘Deaf people point all the time,’ Brenda said. It’s one of the gestures used in Auslan and American Sign Language to denote a speaker. ‘I got told off for pointing at one of the paintings, but I was trying to show my sight-impaired friend what was happening in the work.’ 

‘I got told off too!’ I exclaimed. 

I thought that, for an exhibition that was full of deaf people, the Whitney could have invested in some training for the guards on how to communicate with us. 

After our coffee, Brenda took me into the museum, and showed me a painting of a young girl, aged about nine, with large black eyes. ‘That’s a deaf gaze,’ she said. ‘She’s staring at you directly. The artist is deaf.’ 

The artist, John Brewster Jr. (1766-1854), was a deaf itinerant painter who did not use spoken language, communicating with his patrons with gestures and some writing. Large eyes and well-lit faces are a feature of his portraits – for him, these were likely the most important aspects of his subjects, for they enabled him to read them. 

I watched the girl, Mary Ann Patten Monson, unabashedly staring at the viewer, seeking information from them as I do when I’m trying to work out what’s going on. Many hearing people don’t like it, their gaze slipping away from mine. 

To be deaf is to be a detective. I search for clues in lips, expressions and (sometimes, when my rudimentary Auslan allows it) hands, and piece this together with intonation and the words that I hear. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that Carlon’s novels feature conundrums that her characters – and therefore her readers – try to solve. 

At the opening of The Souvenir, a young woman, Marion, enters the office of Jefferson Shields and says, ‘I was told you solve puzzles.’ She seeks his assistance with a case in which, four years before, one of two sixteen-year-old girls, Sandra and Peta, killed a man and ‘each accused the other. One told a story that was lies. She lied so well no one has ever found out which of them lied.’  The case never went to court due to insubstantial information. The novel is narrated in third person with multiple points of view. The first chapter is told by an omniscient narrator and focalised through Marion, with later chapters titled ‘Sandra’, ‘Peta’ and ‘Marion’, each focalised through these characters. Sandra’s story dominates, and according to her, Peta steals objects from cars as souvenirs. However, according to Peta, it is Sandra who takes the objects to bolster her popularity at school. One of the souvenirs happens to be a box of dangerous pills. In alarm, one of the girls throws the pills away in a park, where they are ingested by a toddler and an elderly man, with the latter causing a terrible accident that results in his death. The theft and death are reported in the news and, when the girls find out, they engage in a hysterical tussle in the park. A bystander tries to intervene and is killed. 

Subsequent chapters include reports from witnesses and a detective, and letters from the girls’ families. The final third of the book is narrated from Shields’ point of view as he visits the girls, now grown into young women, and their parents. The reader, alongside Shields, is left to sift through the facts to arrive at what they think is the truth, the way a deaf person aggregates information and pulls it together to arrive at a meaning. In trying to work out what is happening in the texts – in finding clues and deploying patience as they wait for the meanings to unfurl – the reader can approximate some elements of deaf experience. 

In April this year, the British miniseries Reunion aired on BBC One. The screenwriter, William Mager, and the majority of the cast, are deaf. The series tracks deaf protagonist Daniel Brennan who has been released from prison for killing his friend, a prominent person in their Deaf community. Daniel tries to reconnect with his daughter, but he is traumatised from his time in prison, which was amplified by deafness and loneliness. At one stage, he notes to a prison liaison officer that no one has signed with him in six years. Watching the series with my father who, like the rest of my family, takes care to speak to me clearly, I feel tears spring into my eyes. As with the dark spaces in which Carlon’s female characters are trapped, the prison embodies a culture that disregards deaf people and their experiences. 

Daniel spends most of the series trying to track down a person who has caused him immense harm. When he finally confronts him, he signs, ‘You know the worst thing about being deaf? It’s when you try to tell people something – and they don’t wanna listen. It upsets them. So we learn to stay quiet. We bury everything deep down inside. We push and push it down and we keep it hidden. Does the pain go? No. It’s still there.’ 

I see the anger bristling from Daniel’s body – the tautness of his muscles, the abruptness of his movements. I think about the times when, as a teenager, I shouted and slammed doors because of the ferocity of my isolation, and my fury that I could not control what was happening to me.  

‘I just want to punch something,’ I told my mother, and on occasion I did punch my brother who, to my surprise (for he is a mild fellow), eventually hit me back. After that, I started running every day after school to manage the rage that rose through my blood. 

William Mager, Reunion's screenwriter, observes to Shola Lee of BBC News that ‘every day, as a deaf person, you’re reminded of your deafness’ due to a lack of access – for example, to interpreters at hospitals or doctor’s appointments, or to education, and ‘all those things add up over time and generate a sense of injustice’. He adds that Christine Sun Kim refers to this as ‘Deaf rage’. 

At the Whitney, a guide referred a group of viewers to Kim’s Degrees of Deaf Rage series hanging on the wall. She described, my brother repeated to me, how Kim uses a visual language – geometry – to enable an understanding of the frustration that she, and many deaf people, feel when encountering constant barriers in their lives.  

In Degrees of Deaf Rage in Everyday Situations, Kim cycles through the different angles used in geometry – acute, right, obtuse, straight up, reflex, and what she refers to as ‘full on rage’. The angles are accompanied by short descriptions in capitals of the things that make her mad. ‘Acute rage’ is a forty-five-degree angle shaded in black, with the phrase ‘No apologies from assholes (audists)’. An audist is someone who believes that hearing people are superior to deaf people. Above ‘Obtuse Rage’ – a one-hundred-and-forty-five-degree angle – Kim has written ‘Fast food restaurants. Cashiers.’ She might be referring to the confusion of waiting for an order in a noisy restaurant of hard plastic surfaces, or of waiting for your order to be called out. Once, because I can never hear my name when baristas call it out, I accidentally took someone’s coffee from a counter and was roundly berated. I now use a Keep Cup to see when my order is ready. For ‘Straight up Rage’, a semicircle depicting one hundred and eighty degrees, the phrase ‘Act we don’t exist’ is crossed out, with ‘People who secretly scared of us’ inserted above it. The word ‘are’ is inserted between ‘who’ and ‘secretly’ – an attempt to make the phrase grammatically correct in English, for sign language has its own syntax. For ‘Reflex Rage’, Kim repeats the words that are struck out in the previous images: ‘People who act we don’t exist’. 

Reading this, I recall the times I have stood on the edges of conversations, unable to participate because I cannot follow what is being said. Usually, the only people who notice and make an effort to include me are my family.  

I wonder if the silence in Australian literature about Carlon is connected with her deafness. As my colleague and friend Amanda Tink and I have noted in The Conversation, Australian literature has tended to ignore disabled people. However, it is also true that, having inherited Australian culture’s audism, and perhaps because she had no role models to show her how to exist in the world as a deaf person, Carlon took great pains to hide her deafness. She communicated with her publishers and agent via letter, and used lipreading and speech.  

Only one pair of literary critics – Michael Pollak and Margaret MacNabb – have commented on Carlon’s writing at length. In Gothic Matilda, they observe that, while Carlon thought her country’s ignorance of her writing was due to publishers’ preferences for police procedurals, her forthrightness may have been another factor. Her psychological thrillers ‘raised questions and issues which Australia was not then willing to confront, issues such as child abuse, the position of women in society, group psychology, the meanness of small towns and the pressure on everyone to conform’. As a singular woman who watched the world intently to decipher it, and also to mould herself to it, Carlon was likely alert to the ways in which not everything is as it seems. 

While Pollack and McNabb refer to Carlon’s deafness, they do not consider, as Wyndham and Heyward have, how it shaped her writing. They recognise that her novels are ‘full of rage, full of a sense of the unfairness of life, and it’s hard not to think that this is not her own sense of anger and disappointment about her own lot in life seeping through into her work’. They point to her ‘narrow life with her parents and her cats and her garden’ and the lack of recognition of her work. They do not connect Carlon’s anger with her deafness, or with living in a society that ignores deaf people. 

I return obsessively to Deaf writer Fiona Murphy’s observations on architecture in her memoir The Shape of Sound. She writes, ‘The languages of buildings and bodies are so intertwined they are almost circular. How we understand the world is through our bodies and how we understand our bodies is through the world.’ Murphy writes how sound becomes ‘articulate’ for her in the narrow spaces where walls meet, such as the corners of a café, where voices can be funnelled towards her. Photographs after nights out show her body, after seeking places to hear, ‘contorted in angles of effort’. This phrase echoes her description of the spaces at the edges where she can hear, places where she is ‘cornered’. I cannot help but read this as another metaphor for the ways that deaf bodies are squashed out of sight as people ‘act we don’t exist’.  

To see Kim’s writing on buildings, then, is liberatory. It forces the hearing public to confront deafness instead of ignoring it. Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield, in his essay for the All Day All Night exhibition catalogue, describes how Kim’s murals prompt the viewer to think about the relationships between bodies and buildings. In her murals All Day Future and All Night Future, two black lines of acrylic arch above and below the title of each piece on white walls. They evoke the American Sign Language signs for all day or all night, with the non-dominant hand acting as a baseline, and the dominant hand swaying above or below the air into an arc. The sign is writ much larger on the wall. 

The scale of Kim’s work, Mansfield continues, allows her to ‘animate architecture and public spaces while engaging the viewer in a larger dialogue with the world around us’. In Captioning the City, for example, she printed captions (using square brackets to mirror the way they appear on screens) across buildings in Manchester, such as ‘[The sound of BSL asking why there isn’t a universal spoken language]’ – a wry reference to the frequent question, asked by hearing people, as to why there isn’t a universal signed language. Reading buildings, then, gives the viewer an insight into how deaf people read and interpret the world. 

In the aforementioned YouTube documentary about DeafSpace, Ben Bahan opens by saying, ‘If you have seen deaf people merely as objects of pity, that people with disabilities – “Oh poor folks can’t hear the birds sing, or the music!” Well if that’s the place you’re working from then we gotta work you out of that space initially so you can see that’s not the way we see our lives.’  

It is a slow process. In Kim’s Attention, two large red arms installed at opposite ends of the room are inflated by fans at different times. When they stretch out to their full length, one arm waves and the other points and taps, touching a piece of rock in the centre between them. The installation refers to the way that pointing in sign language draws attention to something or someone, while waving a hand attracts attention to oneself. The parts of the rock where the hands have touched it have eroded, signifying, Kim states, ‘trying to get one’s attention or bring attention to something forever’. The bold red of the hands also calls out for hearing people to pay heed.  

Artists like Kim use humour, and clever diagrams and words, to challenge assumptions about the way deaf people receive sound because deaf people attend – very carefully – to the world around them. They listen with their eyes, taking in details, as Carlon did, about the way people can dissemble and hide their selves. It is why I find the cliché ‘to be deaf to’ incorrect and insulting, and why I, and many other deaf people, are frustrated that hearing people do not match our attentive listening with their own. 

Still, we don’t give up hope. When Rachel Penghill is locked in the dark jewellery vault in The Unquiet Night, she cycles through the possibilities for rescue, cataloguing the people who might drop by and hear her banging on the door. She probes her memory of the vault’s architecture to locate solutions, such as the fact that the wall adjoins a restaurant and the owners might hear her when they open up. She is an intelligent woman who tries to solve her way out of the problem, and only when she has pursued all options does she lie down in exhaustion and close her eyes for what she thinks is the last time.  

Then someone comes to open the door and let in the light.