- CollegeCentral Saint Martins
- CourseMA Graphic Communication Design
- Graduation year2025
This project investigates how an image can operate as language—not through illustration or narration, but through its own structure—and how meaning emerges, shifts, or drifts in the relational space between image and text.
This question led me to a foundational observation: idea, image, and word never fully align. When I say “apple,” the word might refer to a red fruit, a tech company, or a metaphor. An image might show a single fruit, a tree, or something else entirely. The idea evoked might belong to none of these. But this slippage is not a failure of communication—it is where meaning lives. I use this instability as a starting point, not a problem to solve.
Final work
In Semantic Drift, the entire project is organised as a linguistic system. I used five
categories from language—words, tone, syntax, borrowed words, accent—to build a
structural grammar for images.
This project was developed as a way to provide viewers with more context—something to support a clearer engagement with the semantic shifts generated through the parallel structure of image and text. If Semantic Drift presented a linear semantic system, then Image is Language acts as its parallel application and iterative exemplification.
Tabloid headlines were selected as the textual input—short, direct, emotionally charged, and framed with a clear narrative structure. In response, images were constructed using everyday objects. These objects were not used to recreate events, but to extract the structural logic embedded in the news. The resulting images translate the implied relationships, rhythms, and tones of the headlines.
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