Languages Beyond The Word
Works exploring color, sensation, and perception as forms of communication.
This line of inquiry enters into conversation with the languages that live beneath and beyond verbal expression—color, texture, sound, and sensation. These perceptual tools offer insight into our interior landscapes, often carrying meanings we haven’t yet named. By quieting the analytical mind, we create space for other forms of knowing to surface. These works invite us to listen with our bodies, to read color as message, to write not from language but into it—from somewhere deeper.
Across workshops, writings, and participatory installations, this body of work proposes that language doesn’t begin with words—it begins with perception. What we see, hear, touch, and smell becomes the soil for language to root itself. Through guided sensory immersion and creative practice, these projects ask: How does perception shape thought? How can attention to sensation deepen the precision of language? And how might writing become not just an act of self-expression, but a transmission of inner experience? Together, these works trace an arc from playful experimentation to immersive inner mapping—offering new pathways into meaning, memory, and personal truth.
Ménage à Trois
Live Creative Jam / April 8, 2022 / Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
A cross-disciplinary improvisation session where drawing, writing, and live music flowed in continuous exchange. Each round began in a different form—visual, verbal, or sonic—and moved fluidly through the others, each act becoming stimulus for the next. Presented as part of El Nido, an arts and cultural collective co-led by Amanda Aileen Fisher.
What Colors Are Your Rainbow?
Single-Session Workshop, Collaborative Prompt Generation, Handmade Book-Making / September 2023 / Shop Kiki, Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
A hands-on, color-forward writing workshop that turns playful experimentation into a collaborative handmade book. Participants began by building their own 7+ page book form and then sorting through piles of curated word fragments—rare and evocative color names, paired with tactile nouns—to generate original writing prompts.
Rather than simple categories like “blue” or “green,” the color language offered in this workshop included historic, poetic, and scientific terms: cadmium, opal, lemon yellow, sand, indigo, azure. These names carried emotional and cultural weight, inviting participants to perceive color with heightened attention and subtlety. Through guided discussion, they explored how language not only reflects what we see but actually shapes the way we perceive it—how a single word can unlock an entire palette of inner imagery.
Each participant left with a custom book, filled with writing sparked by their own color-word combinations—an intuitive spectrum of personal perception.
Experiments in Writing
Workshop Series, Sensory Writing Laboratory / July-August 2023; returning 2025 / Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
A modular workshop series exploring nonverbal perception as a gateway into language. Each cycle centers on a specific sensory entry point—vision, sound, or smell—and invites participants to write not about what they perceive, but from within it. Through somatic and imaginative activation, participants bypass analytical thinking and tap into the subconscious story beneath the surface.
This series proposes that writing is a form of transmission—a way of capturing and communicating the inner landscape. But to write with clarity and precision, we must first perceive with clarity. The deeper the perception, the more accurate the transmission. These workshops cultivate that depth of seeing, listening, and sensing.
Each session includes sensory immersion, guided writing, and group reflection in an intimate studio setting.
Upcoming Release
The Experiments in Writing series returns in 2025
Revised and expanded with five sensory entry points—Vision, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch—each cycle offers a new way to write from within perception.
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Cycle 1: Entering Through the Visual Field
Participants began by visually engaging with curated images—paintings and photographs—as intuitive portals into their subconscious terrain. One session featured a photograph pinned backwards to the wall, prompting writers to respond not just to the image but to their own curiosity, frustration, or pull toward the unseen. Others were drawn to the object-ness of the image itself: the contact sheet, the way the photographs were hung, the weight of shadow and suggestion. Form: Experimental Writing Workshop, Visual Activation / July 2023
Cycle 2: Entering Through Sound
Working with short and long field recordings, participants practiced deep listening to scenes heard but unseen. They tracked subtle movement, named the energetics of space, and extended their imagination beyond the frame of the audio. Writing became a way to reconstruct a world through sound, capturing the emotional tone and sensory texture of what was not visible—but vividly felt. Form: Experimental Writing Workshop, Auditory Activation / July 2023
Cycle 3: Entering Through Smell
With blindfolds heightening the experience, participants explored a sequence of scent-based activations. Smells became doorways into memory, place, and personal myth. The writing focused on precision—finding the exact words that could translate ephemeral sensation into language vivid enough to transmit it to another. The work asked: *How do we make a reader smell what we smell? Form: Experimental Writing Workshop, Olfactory Activation / August 2023
Participatory Installation, Synesthetic Writing Practice / Ongoing since September 2022 / Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
A multisensory, participatory body of work exploring solitude as a spectrum of states, using color as a portal into emotional and perceptual terrain.
This work began with a question: What are the colors of my solitude? For one month, the artist wrote daily on loose-leaf pages marked with hand-painted strokes of color. At first, the process was intuitive—guided by the tactile pleasure of a handmade journal and the meditative act of writing. But soon, a pattern emerged: each day’s color seemed to hold meaning, revealed not through analysis, but through the act of writing itself. The artist began pulling phrases from the text that echoed the tone of the color, discovering a kind of subconscious code.
By the end of the month, she had created a personal map—an emotional color spectrum, with each hue linked to a state of being. From this spectrum, she extracted a series of works—textile-based pieces, poetic fragments, narrative forms, and participatory experiences—each representing a different layer of translation, from raw sensation to symbolic language.
Click the image above to watch Amanda explain The Colors of Solitude. Filmed during the Todos Santos Open Studio Tour, where the work debuted. | January 26 & 27, 2025 | Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
This body of work includes:
Handmade Color Journals
Artist-created journals designed to guide others through their own color-based writing journey. Each blank journal includes hand-painted strokes of color and is modeled after the original used by the artist. Form: Artist Book, Visual Art Object / Released January 26, 2025
Color Swatches
Visual distillations of the internal color map created through the month-long practice. Each swatch features a vertical section from the original color spectrum—a palette of emotional states decoded through writing. Form: Textile-Based Visual Work, Poetic Extraction / Released March 2025
Color Poems & Stories
Single-stanza poems composed from phrases used to name each day’s color—lyrical traces of the emotional tones of solitude. Form: Textile-Based Visual Work, Poetic Extraction / Released January 2025
Color Story: Chapter Excerpts
The artist later arranged all the color-names into a full narrative, My Becoming—a journey through illusion, contact, and awakening. Each chapter corresponds to a vertical color grouping from the original spectrum, forming a poetic sequence of transformation. Form: Textile-Based Visual Work, Narrative Extraction / Released January 2025
The Writing Journey
A participatory experience guided through audio, and supported by visual, somatic, and synesthetic prompts. Participants move through an environment designed to simulate their interior landscape, using perception and writing to map their emotional spectrum and reimagine their relationship to aloneness. Form: Participatory Installation, Experiential Writing Practice / First Iteration: September 2022; Second Iteration: May 2025
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28 Days of Becoming
A collection of the artist’s original writings from the color journal practice, available exclusively on Substack. Select excerpts are also available as handmade prints. Form: Serialized Writing Collection / To be released May 2025 // Form: Print Ephemera / Released January 2025
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