Rethinking semiotic boundaries in discourse: Multimodal writing in mental health art

While critical discourse studies have increasingly considered the multimodal nature of all discursive practices, there has been a strong tendency to draw/emphasize a boundary between linguistic/textual and non-linguistic/textual elements in interpretive and analytic processes. This paper aims to problematise such a boundary by showing how practices of writing in several pieces of mental health art in Hong Kong effectively blur semiotic boundaries (e.g., the ‘verbal-visual boundary’) in text-based communication. When analysing the artworks, it also considers a set of relevant digital photos and videos generated on ethnographic trips, online publicity about the creators of the mental health art and their works and one interview about the artworks under research. Drawing on social semiotics (e.g., van Leeuwen, 2005), recent sociolinguistic research on multimodal writing (e.g., Jaworski, 2020; Huang, 2023) and narrative discourse research (e.g., De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2015), this paper demonstrates how writing practices which constitute the mental health artworks skilfully assemble diverse semiotic resources (e.g., written narratives, colours, typography, cement wall) to ‘externalise’ particular inner thoughts and feelings. Furthermore, the writing practices are found to build mental health ‘small stories’ (Georgakopolou, 2007) which intertwine different storylines, storytellers and sites of storytelling to express complex, sometimes conflicting attitudes, beliefs and/or experiences related to mental health.