You Know Sometimes Words Have Two Meanings

This Outsider Artist Stopped Speaking As A Child, Communicates Solely Through Her Work
By: Priscilla Frank
Source: Huffington Post
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6097468

  Susan Te Kahurangi King has not spoken since the age of four. Rather, she has expressed herself through her art. Born in 1951, she is currently about fifty-three years of age, forty-nine of those years spent in complete silence. She did not robotically end her speech the moment of reaching age four, but rather gradually between the ages of four to six. Her artwork is a result of pen, graphite, pencil, crayon, and ink upon paper, amongst which she manages to express all that can so easily be said, through such methods so as to counteract the ease with which expression is allowed in the present day. Her artwork is a rather incoherent mass of cartoon characters/objects, aimless creations, disjointed body parts placed in peculiar angles and locations. Her work, titled "Drawings from Many Worlds",  is being shown at the Andrew Edlin Gallery in  New York, serving one of the first roles of presenting her art in the US. King has grown up amongst twelve siblings, all of which have strongly supported her uniquely peculiar and refreshingly "extreme" form of self expression, stating how it no longer seems unusual to them. Adding onto her silence and subjective expressions, King took a pause in creating her artwork, one lasting until 2008, when she began again, all "without explanation" (Frank, 1). Her artwork is depicted as "maps of a place that's not in our head at the moment" (Frank, 1) by a family member, while Lyle Rexer states that the power of "outsider art" as reference to King, "lies not in it's ability to image some preexisting reality but to bring things into being" (Frank, 1). Her vague silence leaves the meanings (if any) behind her works somewhat impossible to fully perceive; yet observers of her art, as well as members of her family manage to express King's great sense of awareness and strong uniqueness/differentiation when comparing her art with that which currently exists.
     It is true that amongst a monotonous conforming mass of humanity, all strive as if it is their dying wish, to be different. Yet it is somewhat unarguable to claim that within this humanity, things exist which can be changed, yet quite rarely are, as they are deemed to be natural and time supported. And King herself has managed to break through such a barrier, managing to keep composure through expression amongst silence. It is possible that expression can come easily to humanity, yet what can be not always is. And what King has managed to do is a pleasant perception of all that a person is able to do, which is  rarely thought about, as it is rarely seen and done. One can, quite possibly, see in her art more than that which could be heard through the deceptive nature  of a word.