What was originally intended to be a simpler piece about the beauty and mystery of languages written in unfamiliar alphabets has become an acknowledgement of the hurdles immigrants to the US have to overcome through both spoken and written language.

I was just going to make a bird covered with Korean Hangul writing from a found newspaper, but while I was looking for a visually compelling portion of characters, I found a full-page ad(?) or article(?) about immigration to the US. The Arabic numerals sprinkled throughout (and appearing occasionally on this bird) are US immigration form numbers. The header was in English, otherwise, I wouldn’t have known the topic, since I couldn’t read anything else.

And so, this is also a meditation on presumptions the locally dominant(?) culture makes about interactions w other cultures in our community and the privilege of those who speak and read English in this country (even if it is the only language they speak and whether or not that is wise).