HAUG SKOLE OG RESSURSSENTER
Haug School and resource centre Schools, in many ways, remind me of road signs both in function and structure. They are our guides through obstacles. They convey information and knowledge, but also rules and duties. We trust their shape and purpose. The signs are a signature and a uniform of a message we need. Our collective sense of belonging and our common knowledge enables us to understand what they mean and why they are here. Because we understand them, we follow them.
Pictograms are a language with few nuances, whose message is rooted in the written language. There are approx. 600 different types with black and white as the only colour combination. They make up an independent language especially designed for those with a limited ability to learn speech, writing or sign language. This thus constitutes the basis of my work at Haug School – a school for learning disabled children. My approach is the fact that I am trapped between my ability to express myself through images and my dyslexia. I myself have been taught by special educationalists, and with tools similar to those used at HS. This has helped me better my written communication, although I still, due to my handicap, depend on assistance to create written documents such as this.
My study, and dyslexia in general, is much like the pictogram: caught between the written word and the picture. The picture is trapped in its own expression, the word in the written Norwegian language. What I find fascinating is that a pictogram consists of one single word and yet at the same time a picture which also conveys so much more. A written word too has a handicap compared with a spoken word which might express so much more nuance. Furthermore, a picture has numerous visual possibilities and thus has more in common with speech than with writing.
The works I have made at HS are not signs with information or rules we are meant to follow, yet not pictograms either. They are pictures, sculptures and installations. Their decoration is their purpose. The message deals with some of what I experienced on my way through the educational system, from Grade School to Art College. It shows how I experiences and mastered being guided on my way towards right and wrong. I developed the idea, chose the pictograms, the description of form for each object, colour and placing. Norway’s largest producer of road signs, Botne Fabrikker, has produced all the objects by machine using the same materials as for official Norwegian road signs.
