“Lying still… ears pricked… you’ll feel that something has changed… you’ll know that you have lost something, that something has been disappeared” (Ogawa, 2019, 3). Inspired by a quote from “The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa, this piece explores what happens if we lose the words to describe the objects around us, as well as the feelings associated with that experience. As humans, we have a unique ability to communicate our ideas to each other through language. Imagine if our knowledge of what the word “book” or “necklace” or “bird” means just disappeared? How would we communicate without the words for simple objects around us? What would our lives look like if we couldn’t place ourselves within the true reality that we live in? In this painting, I attempt to give Yoko Ogawa’s novel justice in its groundbreaking ideas and concepts, as well as visualize the somewhat impossible situation that she describes.
