Joseph Grigely

Deaf since the age of ten, Grigely has focused his work on issues of communication—both its problems and possibilities—by creatively dealing with the absence of speech. His work can be understood as a journey through visual strategies and compositions based on the written word. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, he formed a body of experimental work by creating a series of conceptual sculptures called Perforated Tympani. The title of the series is a reference to an incident: in 1967 he fell down a hill during a game of “King on the Mountain,” and a tree branch lying on the ground punctured his one good ear, leaving the artist totally deaf. As steel beams pierce large slabs of oak and elm, the Tympani sculptures became a medium to return the trauma to the trees.