Kali D.

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Musical Chair
Credit: Kali D.Artist Bio

Kali Doubledee (she/her) is a Deaf art therapist in practice who will be graduating in Spring 2024. You can always find her experimenting with creative processes using her natural artistic intuition outside her art therapy practice. Currently, she enjoys playing with the process of transforming American Sign Language into art, sketching comics, writing poems, and making short videos. Kali is also on track to obtain a Forest Therapy Guide certification from the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy after the end of the 2023 year. Like her love for being in the flow and playful state when creating art, she often finds serenity when she goes into liminality within the Forest space. Kali aspires to co-create spaces with communities of signers and non-signers where they can discover their strengths and build meaningful lives through their relationships with creativity, art, nature, and self.

Artist Statement

As I progress in my art therapy practice as a Deaf individual, I encounter unique experiences that involve navigating dynamics with the presence of interpreters while serving my hearing clients. This navigation entails arranging our seating positions like musical chairs, wondering what sort of impression clients receive from me with a voice that is not mine, and putting extra effort into seeing clients while trying to filter out my interpreters and their transferences. Regarding my creative process, the narrative always plays out in a film style in my mind as I create an artwork that appears to be a “single clip frame.” To be able to articulate this experience even further, I actualized this mental film into a few short clips for you to watch and reflect upon as you enter my shoes…..to see how we dance with the chairs…to see clients from my perspective…and perhaps, to understand why I always get anxious when I need to work with a substitute or a new interpreter, as I do not fully trust that they will voice me as I had hoped. The usage of transparency films helped to echo the overlapping aspect that emerges a lot in this unique dynamic.

While I continue to work with interpreters in clinical settings, I look forward to unpacking and exploring my relationship with interpreters, the impact of their transferences on me, and lastly, their way of processing this experience.