Deaf Voices.
Chelle Destefano.
Chelle Destefano, a Deaf artist, born in 1979 and currently lives in Melbourne, Victoria. She works with watercolour, ink, acrylic, gouache and mixed media to communicate her stories on past lives and living in the now. She is beginning to work in other artforms that include sculpture, art installations and performance art to compliment her visual art works.
Some of her works are compelling, particularly the works that go deep into the stories she shares about her Deaf culture, life of a Deaf person, experiences, stories about moments in life and perspectives of history. She communicates through spatial movements in her work that draw the viewers in to view, ponder and discuss, such as her Auslan Movements sculptural project she is working on at the moment.
Raising our Deaf voices louder to stand up against audism that we have been experiencing for many many years, centuries even. Now is the time to start to really speak up and say enough is enough and to demand equal access and equality in every sense in the communities.
This work relates to my research on growing up Deaf and Deaf culture and has led me towards more research and work on cultural appropriation of our language and Deaf culture.
Images – the paper sculptures were created from spatial movements of sign language when I was signing stories of being Deaf, and holding paper as I signed each word. These sculptures were a finalist in 4 art awards the past year including the Banyule Art Award for Works on Paper, the Lyn McCrea Memorial Drawing Prize, the Noel Counihan Commemorative Art Award, and the Australia Post Art Award.
Another artwork relating to growing up Deaf is one of me sitting as a child trying to listen to and speak to a toy box dog that talked back copying my voice. This event was in 1984 when I was 5 and I painted the artwork in January 2020, this year.
One of the artworks about I will Never Hear Words Ever, punctuates a point about the audism issue, that people assume we can hear perfectly with hearing aids on, but that’s not so, and it goes to say that when we wear hearing aids or the cochlear implant after the age of 5, we don’t have an auditory memory that was ever developed before age 5, so we never get to hear words clearly but only hear sounds, sometimes learning to recognise where sounds come from or what they are.
My video poetry performance on audism is a strong message regarding audism not being acceptable and how we are now raising our Deaf voices louder.
To view the video, visit: