Mother of DE‘VIA – Seeds from Within, 2022
Glazed ceramic sculpture
Mother of De’VIA – Seeds from Within, honours Betty G. Miller (1934-2012), “Mother of the Deaf View Image Art (De’VIA)” movement. She was the first to emphasize bold graphic depictions of sign language oppression and later began painting colourful affirmations of the beauty of sign language. Her Deaf resistance art in the early 1970’s was revolutionary and a precursor to the eventual De’VIA Manifesto she and her colleagues articulated in 1989. Miller represents Deaf cultural ancestral seeds that grow from within.
This sculpture pays homage to her famous ink painting, AMESLAN (aka American Sign Language [ASL]) Prohibited, (1972) and celebrates the beauty of ASL painted in the renowned acrylic, Growing with ASL (1992). Hafizirad sculpts two roughly textured black and white handcuffed hands tied together by wire with finger-tips broken off – like a withering plant. This is juxtaposed with a contrasting colourful sculpture series, symbolic of the sign “grow” with a progression of three vibrantly glazed hands emerging well-nourished - watered by golden hands. ASL, “as good as gold”, like the air we breathe and the watering of plants, gives us life. With ASL we flourish.
Glazed ceramic sculpture
Mother of De’VIA – Seeds from Within, honours Betty G. Miller (1934-2012), “Mother of the Deaf View Image Art (De’VIA)” movement. She was the first to emphasize bold graphic depictions of sign language oppression and later began painting colourful affirmations of the beauty of sign language. Her Deaf resistance art in the early 1970’s was revolutionary and a precursor to the eventual De’VIA Manifesto she and her colleagues articulated in 1989. Miller represents Deaf cultural ancestral seeds that grow from within.
This sculpture pays homage to her famous ink painting, AMESLAN (aka American Sign Language [ASL]) Prohibited, (1972) and celebrates the beauty of ASL painted in the renowned acrylic, Growing with ASL (1992). Hafizirad sculpts two roughly textured black and white handcuffed hands tied together by wire with finger-tips broken off – like a withering plant. This is juxtaposed with a contrasting colourful sculpture series, symbolic of the sign “grow” with a progression of three vibrantly glazed hands emerging well-nourished - watered by golden hands. ASL, “as good as gold”, like the air we breathe and the watering of plants, gives us life. With ASL we flourish.
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