Annabelle Binnerts
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 Novel Tongues, 2025
 In a way, language is always looking for a ‘body’: in the literal sense, in the form of a mouth that speaks the words, or in the figurative sense, a book or page as a carrier or ‘body’ of words. This is how I approach the works I make as well: they are a way to give shape to language, words, and stories.
The works I developed for PARK started from this line of thought, they focus on the physical, bodily aspects of language in a literal sense.

For example, the enamel triptych examines the bodily, physical aspects of language. They approach voices, mouths, lips, and tongues as carriers of words and language as an embodied experience. The circular shapes function as abstracted images of open mouths, the words passing through them as they’re being spoken. 
The sentences in the work play with the idea of the same set of words taking on different shapes because of how and by whom they’re being said: how the same set of written words will take on different shapes and meanings due to the mouth that speaks them.

The audio work Hot Air and the resulting textile works Vapour and Almost a word (Sigh) and (Gasp) also take spoken language and words in relation to the body as a basis, but emphasize the elusive, fleeting side of this. 
In the audio work, words are described as ‘hot air’ that, after being formed by the mouth and tongue, leaves the body, to merge with the open air, as it were, invisibly dissolving into all the words that had ever been spoken before.

The textile works attempt to capture language in this ‘mist-like’ form: written in half-blurred, strangely distorted lines, the words are almost illegible. 
In Vapour, the thin, slightly wobbly lines of the letters seem to mimic the shapes of a mirage or fata morgana, the optical phenomenon that takes place when hot and cold air overlap.
The two works of the diptych Almost a word focus on the ‘airy’ elements of language: the in- and outward breaths we call gasps or sighs, which can definitely serve a communicative function but are not words in themselves. 

The final textile piece, titled Double/Dubbel grew from a love for the double meaning of the word ‘spoken’ when translated between ENG and NL. In NL, the word means ‘ghosts’, which to me beautifully resonates with the image of a word that, after being said, hangs elusively in the air between the one who said it, and the one being spoken to.