The artwork of Julie Russell-Steuart
Artist’s Books, Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Photography, Video, Installation: Always being updated, both recent and archival works will find their way here.
Currently showing here: An artist’s book, “She Didn’t Know”
Julie Russell-Steuart 2010
“She Didn’t Know” is a subtle exploration of the experience of having a hearing loss. Rather than reading a straight-forward text, viewers interact with the fourteen pages or packets, which become progressively larger. Each translucent packet has an illustration painted on the front, with faintly visible backward reading text inside. As the viewer turns it over in puzzlement to read the text, small glass beads swish inside, providing a curious sound and another layer of sense that must be deciphered. Only with effort, by pressing the packet, can each line of the fourteen line sonnet be read. In this way, the viewer gets a sense of how hard a person with a hearing loss must work to understand conversation in a group.
The poem’s content and visual imagery utilize metaphor, and the typography references fairytales, complete with drop cap paragraphs, as the speaker’s (and viewer’s) imagination strains to build a story around snippets of heard conversation.
