Choose your words carefully

We already speak this language. So if it is already part of our everyday lives, why doesn’t it have a script?

Choose Your Words Carefully is a body of work through which I am developing a script for a language that already exists.

The work reflects on the politics of saying: what we say, what we mean, how we say it, and what we choose not to say.

We live in a time where language is increasingly negotiated. Things are referred to rather than named. Statements are made through implication and reference. What is left unsaid can carry as much weight as what is spoken. Words are chosen so carefully that they can begin to lose their ability to communicate.

This way of speaking has become familiar enough to be recognised as a language of its own. I began to wonder what its written form might look like.

Working from my longstanding engagement with text, I began developing a script for it.

The works are composed characters of this proposed script. The script is an ongoing process rather than a finished alphabet. These works represent my contribution to its development—characters that may be added to, altered or extended by others as the system evolves.

There is a satirical dimension to the proposition. If this language is already part of how we communicate, perhaps it should have the structures we associate with any established language: a script, a system, a way of being taught and eventually a place within everyday life.

The work considers the space between what we say and what we mean, how we say it and what we don’t.

The language is already here.

This is its proposed script.