121511-0-U59670-F.jpg
121511-0-U59670-F.jpg

Ben Sheppee | Allophone II

£650.00
3D Print
Edition of 15
Dimensions (WxH): 20 x 33cm

Ben Sheppee's practice examines language as a visual and cultural system, treating written form as both communicative structure and material record shaped by movement, exchange and loss. Working across immersive installation, sculpture, print and generative digital environments, his research explores how meaning shifts as legibility becomes unstable, and how communication can persist beyond the confines of letters and words to be expressed in purely visual terms. Drawing on sustained research into global scripts and typographic structures, the work moves between recognisable alphabets and abstracted, hybrid forms. Characters drawn from endangered and lesser-known writing systems are isolated, reconfigured and rebuilt, as composite glyphs, sculptural objects, and evolving typographic fields, until they read as simultaneously ancient and unplaceable. These investigations address cultural syncretism and a personal inquiry into origin and identity, rooted in Sheppee's own experience of adoption and life in cosmopolitan London. The practice is articulated through three interconnected research strands: Language as System, Language as Memory, and Language as Origin. It functions as an adaptable research framework rather than a fixed series, proposing identity as something constructed through convergence rather than singular origin, and writing as one of humanity's earliest visual art forms.
3D Print
Edition of 15
Dimensions (WxH): 20 x 33cm

Ben Sheppee's practice examines language as a visual and cultural system, treating written form as both communicative structure and material record shaped by movement, exchange and loss. Working across immersive installation, sculpture, print and generative digital environments, his research explores how meaning shifts as legibility becomes unstable, and how communication can persist beyond the confines of letters and words to be expressed in purely visual terms. Drawing on sustained research into global scripts and typographic structures, the work moves between recognisable alphabets and abstracted, hybrid forms. Characters drawn from endangered and lesser-known writing systems are isolated, reconfigured and rebuilt, as composite glyphs, sculptural objects, and evolving typographic fields, until they read as simultaneously ancient and unplaceable. These investigations address cultural syncretism and a personal inquiry into origin and identity, rooted in Sheppee's own experience of adoption and life in cosmopolitan London. The practice is articulated through three interconnected research strands: Language as System, Language as Memory, and Language as Origin. It functions as an adaptable research framework rather than a fixed series, proposing identity as something constructed through convergence rather than singular origin, and writing as one of humanity's earliest visual art forms.