What would a conversation between two people who stutter look like?
As I write I am putting the finishing touches to a collaborative piece of work that Conor Foran and I have been working on for our upcoming exhibition at City Lit in London. The exhibition is called ’Wouldn’t you rather talk like us?’ – a title that comes from Joshua St Pierre’s ‘Did I Stutter?’ blog. Joshua turns the dominant narrative around stammering on its head, viewing it as a way of speaking that unexpectedly acts as a force of creativity and value in its own right. The phrase also cheekily highlights the usually invisible assumption that fluency is the unspoken standard that we are all expected to conform to.
Making the invisible visible has been a feature of both of our work for the last few years. We want to celebrate stammering voices – to look at new ways that stammering can be positively depicted and illuminated. Conor’s work with typography, graphic design and poetry enables stammered speech to be represented in its written complexity and playfulness. My portraits of people actively stammering try to capture and revel in the moment of stammering and present it as a valuable and important part of diverse speech. Both of our work refuses the way stammered speech is usually silenced and erased from ‘acceptable’ speech norms.
This takes me back to our collaborative piece. It is titled ‘Shaping Fluency’ and plays around and questions assumptions around fluent norms. We started with the word ‘fluency’ superimposed over two images of our faces caught in a moment of stammering. We then have played with its legibility by splitting it into 28 panels that repeat, stretch and block and pause just like our speech.
The idea has come out of months of conversation and the sharing of ideas, images, sketches, mock- ups and experiments. It has felt like a truly enriching and fun discussion between two people who stammer. In a strange way the final piece is a depiction of the beautiful dysfluent conversations we have had. It has no final set form – the pieces can be re-ordered in an almost infinite number of ways like our stammers unexpectedly do to our speech. Some arrangements may be more visually legible and fluent than others, some more dysfluently playful and illegible. Like our speech it can morph and change offering new juxtapositions and surprises.
I hope that you can make it to see whatever version we decide it will take on the day.
By Paul Aston
The exhibition ‘Wouldn’t you rather talk like us?’ is at the City Lit Gallery, WC2B 4BA.
It opens on 29th November 2024 at 6.00pm and runs until 13th December 2024.
An afternoon of panel discussions with both artists is scheduled for 30th November from 2.00pm to 5.00pm.
Places can be booked via: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/wouldn-t-you-rather-talk-like-us-artwork-discussions/vq113-2425