Interview with Nina Thomas

Benjamin Cook interviews Nina Thomas on her film Silence (2020) presented as part of D/deaf Artists' Film Commissions Exhibition

Benjamin Cook
A group of birds populate a calm seashore. The scene is overlaid with a close up of sea forms from wave heating the sand. A faint layer of letter cutouts are visible here and there.
Silence, Nina Thomas, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

To mark the final month of our online exhibition of the film Silence (2020) which was commissioned as part of a new ongoing series exploring access in artists’ moving image, Benjamin Cook spoke to the artist Nina Thomas about her practice and the ideas in her latest work.

 

Can you talk about your background and why you originally applied for the LUX commission? 

I am a visual artist who works with the mediums of video, photography, artist publication and installation. Much of my recent work has been inspired by my experience of becoming deaf, which led me to seek to understand other deaf experiences and histories. I also work with a number of organisations that aim to improve access to film and the arts for deaf and disabled people. 

I applied for this commission because I was excited by the opportunity to explore ideas I’ve been working on and thinking about for some time. I was particularly pleased to see that the open call was asking what a deaf artists cinema might look like and for works which didn’t include sound, in which a hearing and deaf audience might have equal access. As an artist who is deaf an opportunity to engage creatively and critically with these concepts and subject matter is rare; it was such an exciting opportunity I had to apply.

 

What was the process of making the film (particularly in terms of making work in midst of the pandemic), what did you want to explore and what did you learn through the experience?

Initially, I hoped restrictions might ease and I’d be able to do a lot more filming in person. I was fortunate that Sahera Khan very kindly agreed to be involved and was able to send me a video performance.  I also met with the Deaf Women’s Group in Ealing, who I have known since 2017. Janine Volossevich facilitates the group’s meetings and is very aware of the isolation that a lot of deaf people are currently facing and has continued the meetings in parks – when restrictions allowed. I met with the women several times and I recorded their experiences of education, family, work, communication, and the challenges they have faced. I had some very important conversations with them. This is something I would really love to return to and explore further, because there was so much I could have used in this film that I didn’t have a chance to.

When I was creating the film I was thinking about this idea of silence and what silence might mean, that wasn’t simply about an absence of sound. I was thinking about the silenced and silence as a space for reflection, or space beyond language. I was thinking about the silencing of the deaf community and denial of language and community. I found great pleasure in taking a black marker to Upon a Method of Teaching Language: To a Very Young Congenitally Deaf Child (1883) and silencing Alexander Graham Bell, whose impact on deaf lives was so devastating. Any written text (including captions) in my film comes from a redaction and repositioning of that text. 

 

A translucent portrait of an old white man is overlaid with an image of a hand that writes “Mr Bell '' with a white chalk on a black board. Several letter cutouts write “up the word with the exception of, I covered, I” from left to right.

Silence, Nina Thomas, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

 

I am very interested in this idea of the mother and child, and their relationship in terms of the pre-linguistic and how the relationship informs our entry into language. I had watched a lot of archival footage that related to deaf education and I was struck by references to the mother and child relationship there, particularly in two of the films I chose to use. The first film you see is of a deaf child being taught to speak by a teacher of the deaf – the word “mommy” is used. There is this touch of the child’s hand to her face, which is obviously intended to support the child to learn the vibration of sound, but I thought this moment was really multi-layered in terms of meaning and tensions. I also included glimpses throughout the film of another film called It’s okay to be deaf, Denise, which is an American public information film, but is really about a mother and her relationship to her deaf child.  It’s a very familiar narrative, one which deaf people have had projected onto their lives for centuries – of pity.  But actually, as you watch the film, it is the parents who are struggling with her deafness, not Denise – and often, instead of accepting their difficulty, they place the blame on Denise as being unreasonable or difficult. But what Denise has experienced in early childhood is language deprivation, when she is introduced to sign language and is able to communicate, she becomes bilingual and flourishes, as does the whole family – everyone’s life is enriched. 

Within my film Herwinder (a member of the Deaf women’s group) discusses her experience with me. She’s explaining the consequence of oralist education on her life. Explaining, that she would go to an oral school, then go home and was unable to communicate with her family, turn the TV on and see a programme such as See Hear (a British Sign Language programme) which could have been accessible to her but, as she hadn’t been taught BSL, it wasn’t. So, you have a situation where the implications of the denial of sign language are played out really clearly – she wasn’t just being denied a language, she was cut off from communication with her family and friends, education and culture too. As an adult who became deaf I could relate; I have often felt incredibly isolated, in a way I couldn’t have imagined before – from family and friends and from art and culture. If we were all taught sign language in schools, there would be no reason for this to happen. Or, as artist Christine Sun Kim wrote, “If sign language was considered equal, we’d already been friends”. I chose not to caption any of the sign language in the film – I felt like: why should I make it easy for a hearing audience? I want them to have to work at it and have a disorientated experience for a few minutes, that deaf people experience every day.

I haven’t made anything quite like this film before, so it was all very much a learning process. The space that LUX gave me to experiment and their interest in this subject matter made it such a rewarding experience, I am so grateful. I feel excited for the future – that there is an interest in the type of work I would like to create.

 

Silence, Nina Thomas, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

 

In terms of the commission we were interested in the idea of what a D/deaf artists cinema might be, not a cinema that is made accessible to D/deaf people but one which never presumed a hearing audience. Do you have thoughts about what this might look like and how it might develop?

So, there is a history of cinema as a space in which deaf people and hearing were equally included – early cinema and silent films were accessible to both deaf and hearing audiences. Perhaps we are in a time now where technological developments, the nature of global communication and social media might see this space open up again. How we view films is changing all the time – hearing audiences are often viewing without sound, because they are viewing on phones or handheld devices. Platforms like Netflix also provide captioning for much of their content – and we know these services aren’t there for, or only used by deaf people. So it would be interesting to see how captioning is used creatively and critically, to challenge or to create additional layers of meaning and interpretation. Personally, I would love to see access considered, not simply as an add-on element but at the early stages of developing films. Perhaps a deaf artist’s cinema might decide that rather than privileging English language it would explore alternative structures, narratives and signifiers – which don’t follow English language grammatical and narrative structure. How also might our relationship to the body and other senses be considered? There is a lot to be excited about within the concept of a deaf artists cinema and so much I would love to explore further.

 

Beyond your work as an artist I know you are actively involved in thinking about access issues in relation to the arts, can you tell me a bit about that work and some of your aspirations for changes that you want to see in terms of culture in the UK.

Yes, so I’ve also blogged a lot over the years about my experience to try to encourage change. I have also worked on many projects that aim to improve access to the arts and culture for deaf and disabled people. I am a founding member of an organisation called The Film Bunch. Shaz Begum (the director) and I both had similar experiences – graduating and finding that it was a lack of access that held us back.  Whether it was films not captioned, inaccessible networking events, talks or workshops there so much that we both found inaccessible. So The Film Bunch is really our response to that shared experience. 

I am also a trustee at Stagetext. I often say that discovering their work was life changing for me, because it allowed me to access arts and culture that I had been deprived of since I became deaf. But there is still so much that is inaccessible and so much that needs to be done. If you are deaf you are twice as likely to experience mental illness. I feel that statistics can be meaningfully linked to the injustices and isolation many deaf people face. It makes me angry that we still have to fight so hard for access that should just be standard. I believe there is a wealth of unexplored talent that is simply being lost as a result. As I always say, a truly inclusive society benefits us all.

 

D/deaf Artists’ Film Commissions screening is on view until 16 March 

Watch the film Silence here.

 


Nina Thomas is a visual artist, using the mediums of video, photography, artist publication and site-specific installation. Much of her recent work has focused on her experience of becoming deaf and subsequently seeking to understand deaf histories and experiences. She has exhibited at venues such as Tate Exchange, St. Margaret’s House and HeART in Chatham. She is a founding member and project coordinator at The Film Bunch (a deaf and hard of hearing film organisation) and trustee at Stagetext. Her project will be a visual poem examining concepts of silence from a deaf perspective, including references to an oralist education: an education which assumes speech to be superior to sign language and forces deaf children to lip read and speak rather than sign. The film will offer a quiet meditation on silence, not as deprivation but as an embodied experience and as a site of repair. www.ninathomas.org

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