Visual Sound is a project I began in my last year at Oregon State University. My intent was to capture and describe in some way, the challenges of being deaf. I was born deaf, have used hearing aids since I was three, and grew up in a hearing community, and was taught to hear/speak in an Oral/deaf school. Early on I leaned on pictures to understand the world around me, gravitating to images which filled in the missing pieces of information I couldn't grasp because even with the strongest hearing aids, I will miss many sounds of speech, especially in the higher pitch tones. Years of speech therapy, excellent teachers, and lip reading, all helped, but often it was a picture that added clarity to my world. In this project, I decided to take pieces out of the image, which represent sound waves on an audiogram. The areas where information is missing has to be filled in by the viewer, similar to how a deaf person has to fill in the information living in a hearing world. This image, of an activist on campus speaking through a megaphone, won the OSU Presidents Award for Art in 2021.