The Textures of Language: An auto-ethnography of a gloves collection

Whilst narratives of multilingualism tend to focus on the objective of language, as separate from the people speaking them and their stories, this study aimed at investigating a ‘deviant’ story. One that delves into the personal aspects of the multilingual subject experience. This emphasis on the personal and the contingent allows me to connect with the affective in my multilingual experience in a way that is rare in more traditional ethnographical accounts. By reflecting on the materiality of my own arts-practice project I am able to access my subjectivity and a range of subtle layers evoked and uncovered by a different way into language. In focusing on the subjective experience, the use of autoethnography allows me to concentrate not only on the emotive and the experimental, but also on the biographical. In this way, my life was not seen as frozen in time, a snap-shot, but rather, as incomplete and as life-in-progress.