i am a student, again, with deadlines and homework and frustrating starts and stops. i was excited to create something with my own crude emerging hand-drawn animation skills. i originally wanted to animate some word that had mostly stems, like illuminate. but then i read about the symbolism of the mouth in the wonderful A Dictionary of Symbols by J. Cirlot (1962): the mouth as organ of speech, and thus creation, as well as of devouring, and thus destruction. creation-destruction, sounds very primal. as is the mouth. it got me thinking about teeth morphing into the stems of a word. in the symbolism book, the mouth of monsters as depicted in the art of the European Middle Ages was often a portal to the underworld, or otherworld. think Jonah swallowed by the whale. the top teeth–heaven. the bottom teeth–earth, or hell. i then decided that writing is a nice fit for something that gives us both heaven and earth, as it uplifts us but also has separated us from oral culture, from our animal being.
