Mother Tongue

Mother Tongue combines printmaking methods (screenprint on paper) with digital audio.
The series explores Magda’s son’s speech development from his first cry, recorded as she gave birth to his words and sentences up until he was three years old.

These sounds are captured in three-minute sonic segments trigged by the playful action of tugging the cord of a domestic CD player. However, The viewer is first invited to engage with these sounds visually and decipher the phonetic bilingual text and soundwaves found on the drawings.

In these three prints, temporary sounds are preserved as visual

artefacts allowing Stawarska to represent the passing of time and preserve the ephemeral moments in the development of a child’s relationship with language. In one of the prints the diction by the parents and repetition by their son of words in Polish and English illustrate the passing of identity and language from a parent to their child.

Exhibited