Firefighting Words Whilst Facing Fears

Firefighting Words Whilst Facing Fears  

Indian Inks and Wash, 2023

Created and described by Jhinuk Sarkar.

[abstract sounds of metal throughout]

The illustration has a clean white background, with all illustrated elements hand drawn in inks and washes ranging from black fine lines to dark brown and burnt umber brushstrokes, with occasional water washes.

[metal rods clanging]

Shooting up from the bottom right-hand corner is a dragon-like creature, sideways on, shown from its long neck upwards and with thick, tough, scaly skin all over the long snouted face. 

[loud dragon’s roar]

Its open mouth is breathing dark smoke, its long V-shaped pointed tongue wiggling between sharp piranha-like sets of small teeth.

[smoke blowing]

Surrounding the smoke, across the rest of the image area is a mixture of handwritten letters spelling the word ‘Dyslexia’ repeatedly in a calligraphic style in some places, while other letters are drawn more boldly with brush strokes. All the words are dark brown and burnt umber in colour, almost black in areas. 

The letters are in upper- and lower-case letters, ranging in size and placement around the rest of the space. 

[metal clanging intensifies]

The words overlap each other and are placed in different directions, including upside-down or broken up – in fact you can only read the word ‘Dyslexia’ fully three times, but it is repeated more often than that. As the words overlap more the letters create almost a mesh of unreadable words as they are laid on top of each other and appear so jumbled they create tangled lines from the letters. These tangled and broken letters create dense dark spaces and other sparser spaces around the whole illustration but never near the dragon’s smoke – that’s what is keeping the words at bay! Some of the letters are just outlines, others coloured in, and in some that are coloured in, there looks to be lighter-brown areas, appearing as though they are singed or burnt away where they have tried to get too close to the dragon.

[dragon’s roar]

This illustration is a visualisation of the experience of having Dyslexia, a Neurodivergent condition that is diagnosed when there is a learning difference in how words, letters, reading, or writing is processed neurologically. 

[roaring, smoke and clanging continue]

Though it is not an abstract illustration, the narrative that is visualised has a fictional and fantastical tone. It particularly illustrates the struggle to fight against words, to control them and not be overloaded by them, and by using forces that can feel like they must come from other worlds or imaginary spaces in order to win in the fight. These forces are illustrated to share how much this experience feels like facing the fears in managing the constant onslaught of text. The image ultimately attempts to visualise some of my own experiences of Dyslexia and other Neurodivergent peoples’ stories I have listened to.

[dragon’s roar before all sounds fade]