This is a Language Warning!

Abstract

“To be brought up with a language, be it Welsh or any other minority language, is to share a sense of close fellowship with other speakers of that language. To have an almost ‘hidden history’ of allusion and collective memory. To understand, as one grows older, the fragility of that culture and to feel a sense of custodianship towards it”.

Bala, 2020

Veronica Calarco’s PhD exhibition showed lithographs, silkscreen prints, paintings, and a large sound installation emanating from prints which had been woven into basket forms. The title ‘This is a Language Warning!’ was taken from double j, an Australian radio broadcast, and subtitled ‘Visualising an Endangered Language as Realized Through the Notion of Country.’

Calarco’s topic highlighted the politics of endangered and minority languages and how they are consumed and colonized by a dominant language of a more powerful ethnic group – in this case the English language. The two languages which Veronica featured are an endangered Australian Indigenous language named Gunnai/ Kŭrnai, the language of her native homeland, and Welsh, the language of her adopted homeland. All the images reflected her exploration of these two languages through names, words, myths, and the natural world.