Early last year the US and much of the world collectively hunkered down to protect against the pandemic, Gilliam began her project drawing the Latin alphabet. Initially, it was an exercise in mark-making. She didn’t know where it would lead her. Her work has always alluded to her physical body in some form, and in this instance, Gilliam challenged herself to write with both her dominant left hand and her non-dextrous right hand to see how a loss of control could abstract and unexpectedly shift the visual field as well as her visual language. 

But then, as the year of social isolation continued, and the daily news reports that were her constant soundtrack kept revealing a growing dissonance between fact and fiction, Gilliam found herself thinking deeply about communication and the nature and evolution of language. As the letters flowed from her hands to the page, forwards and backwards on repeat, they too seemed to evolve in much the same way as the world’s alphabets have done so through civilizations. Each drawing became a conversation with its own resonance. She feels a letter or character in any alphabet contains possibilities; a past, a future, compassion and connection, alienation, and the potential for misunderstanding. In the words of Victor Hugo “Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet”.