In my essay I am looking at the common heritage of written signs and images through my own experience of attention deficiency and mental illness. Through this lens of experience in which words and images are vividly transformed and merged, I am reflecting on language and art and their overlapping.

Throughout the text I reference early written entirely pictorial languages, the painterly terms of thought disorders, as well as how the images that gave name to the characters in the phonetic alphabet is still lurking in the very letters themselves. I also exemplify how attention deficiency can evoke new image/text hybrids in a chapter I call ADHD poetry.

In my own artistic practice I am drawn towards a melting point of language, written sign, image, high and low, illusion-representation-materiality, intellect and intuition. The surface as a physical object and idea – that there is a two-dimensional space where we project fantasies and fiction.

Through prose, play, rhythm, rant, word salad, crumble of meaning etc. sandwiched, I am observing the swelling of words.