Across her multidisciplinary practice, Bethany Collins engages with language as both the subject and primary material of her work. In her Contronyms (2014–2018) series, Collins selects contronyms—words that contain their own opposite definitions—rendering their dictionary definitions in graphite and using her own spit and a pink pearl eraser to erase, blur, and obscure all but the contrary definitions. Foregrounding the limitations and contradictions of language, these works destabilize problematic and reductive binaries. “What consistently complicates and refutes that binary is the residue—the residue of language altered, blurred or partially erased presents a more complicated ‘third way,’” Collins explains. “[T]he Contronym series itself destabilizes that either/or proposition. … Highlighting those contradictions through erasure tackles the absurdity of our expectations of a kind of singular clarity.”
