Britni Bicknaver
Britni Bicknaver is an artist, educator, history buff, and a seventh-generation Cincinnatian. A member of the storied Publico Gallery, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.
Traditionally trained in sculpture and drawing, Bicknaver also works in the medium of sound, creating pieces from audio tours to soundtracks of found objects. Her work is fueled by concepts such as history, memory, arcane information, and the revelation of inner worlds.
Transcription of Audio Interview With Artist Britni Bicknaver
"So, I am a sound artist, which essentially means I like to express my ideas with sound instead of through like, other visual means, like painting, or drawing, or, sculpture or anything like that. So the piece I made um, it is a piece essentially about stuttering. I am a stutterer, and I wanted to capture kind of something that, um, happened relatively recently in my stuttering journey. When I was younger, as a stutterer, I had a lot of shame around stuttering. I was really ashamed that I spoke differently than everybody. But as I grew up and as there was less and less shame attached to my stuttering, I kind of was able to, um, notice kind of like the qualities of my stuttering. Because I wasn’t having these like negative feelings about it anymore and being in, especially being in speech therapy, and I did another round like a couple years ago, being in speech therapy, you stutter on purpose to practice techniques to be more fluent. And I noticed that when I was in there, like, because I was in a total safe environment, that I could really be present like with what my speech sounded like. And then I started noticing like all of these musical qualities about my stuttering, like the texture or rhythm or things that almost sounded like singing to me, and I wanted to capture that with this piece."