From The Dallas Morning News:At the entrance of the Shelton School in Dallas hangs a bronze sculpture of long, skeletal fingers on a hand, straining and barely touching a half-opened book with its title, The Miracle Worker, etched backward on the cover.
The 2003 piece, inspired by the story of Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen Keller to understand words, cuts close both for its artist, Eric McGehearty, (pictured) and for the students at Shelton, where McGehearty once went to school.
"It's up to you if the hand is going to grab the book," says McGehearty, who has grappled all his life with dyslexia, a processing problem that makes it difficult for him to read and write even now at age 30.
McGehearty's latest work, Locked Behind Words, which will debut Wednesday in a special installation at Tarrant County College's Northwest Campus in Fort Worth, strikes a similar theme.
It depicts shelves of books that form a doorway.
"The books become a doorway and a restriction to passage through that doorway at the same time," the artist explains from the garage packed with the tools and materials that he uses to create his work in the Lewisville home he shares with his wife, Heather, and their 1-year-old son, Keegan.
When McGehearty grew up, it was hard to imagine that anything good could come out of a condition that caused him to be mocked by his fellow students for his inability to grasp the alphabet or repeat the months of the year.
By fourth grade, when his parents enrolled him in Shelton, he couldn't read or write and spent his time creating pictures in his head that he would put to paper. After years of being bullied and belittled, he had found his release in art – "the one place where I had no disability, where I could do just as well as anyone else." He didn't have much confidence in his intelligence. But the teachers at Shelton wouldn't let him give up.
His first breakthrough came during a summer art class before fifth grade when he broke his right arm the first week.
He explained to the teacher that he would have to drop the class because he was unable to hold a paintbrush.
"She said, 'You're not going to do that. You can paint with your feet. You can paint with a paintbrush in your mouth.' She wouldn't let me quit."
That, he says, is when he realized that just as breaking his arm didn't have to stop him from doing what he needed to do, dyslexia didn't have to stop him from pursuing his dreams.
Suddenly, he was determined to study and find his way into the world of books. Even now, after he's taught on the college level, after receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of North Texas, he continues to push himself, working with a computer that speaks to him and listening to books from Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic – an organization for which he is a consultant and national spokesman. If he doesn't know how to spell the number 8, he Googles the number 8 until he finds the word "eight," and then puts the word in a list of difficult words that he is struggling to memorize.
It was in graduate school that he had a second breakthrough that inspired him to create many of his current pieces. He had sculpted a bronze statue of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to a life of eternal struggle, pushing a rock up a mountain that was always doomed to roll back down to him."My professor told me he could see the struggle in the piece but wanted to know where it was coming from in me. I told him about my dyslexia for the first time. And he said, 'I would like to see your struggle in the work – not just anyone's struggle.' I hadn't ever thought about doing art that was about me. But that gave me permission."
He drew upon the frustration he felt at not being able to read the books he loved to create Repetition of Unreadable Books –an installation of books trapped in concrete blocks. The Miracle Worker came from this period, as did a 2004 piece he did for Shelton called Higher Education, which depicted an upside-down school chair and books pierced by the limbs of a tree, that can be interpreted as a very prickly Tree of Knowledge.
McGehearty does not see himself as creating art exclusively related to dyslexia. He is particularly proud of United We Stand, an outdoor bronze sculpture of boots on the ground that he created for the city of Fort Worth's Fire Station No. 8 to commemorate the heroism and sacrifice of firefighters. And he is hard at work on pieces for a one-person show that he will be staging in November at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, including a red canvas with a mouth emerging from one small portion of it as if in midscream.
But he does derive a sense of purpose and mission in knowing he has made a difference in the lives of kids who are going through what he went through.
Last week at Shelton, 14-year-old Kathryn Edel told him about the "big commotion" the kids made when Higher Education arrived at the school five years ago.
"Everyone was talking about it," she says. "Seeing everything upside down shows you how hard it is to concentrate when everything is screwball. It wasn't until I came here in second grade that I learned to read. This sculpture expresses what it's like to have dyslexia. And it has really inspired me, because now I know I can do anything, even become an artist."
McGehearty says he hopes that one day Kathryn and others will see that her condition is not just something to be overcome, but an opportunity.
"I wouldn't trade my dyslexia for the world. I learned a lot from it. It taught me empathy. And it taught me how to stand up for myself. If I hadn't been dyslexic, then I wouldn't have been as determined and strong or successful as I am today."
