This novel sculptural piece by Takayuki Ogawa shows each letter of the alphabet in the form of a mouth shaped to pronounce that letter. Oral:phabet, as he calls it, is an exploration of the emotional communication of the mouth in movement:
“The mouth alone is able to express many emotions,” says Ogawa, speaking about the impetus for his project, which was presented as his graduating thesis last year from Tama Art University. “For example, in email we use the letter D to create the smiling emoticon :D. But what if we gave similar attributes to letters like B or N which are never used as expression forms?” The result, as you can see is a disturbingly realistic serious of mouths, lips, teeth and tongues, all hand-crafted from clay and mounted to a wooden frame.
(Photos: Kyoutaro Hayashi)