A Sixth Sense for Sculpture : Blind, Deaf Chris Cook Connects Through His Art

Blindness cuts people off from the world of things, Helen Keller said. Deafness cuts them off from the world of people.

Chris Cook, like Keller herself, is shut out from both.

Struck in his infancy with a severe inflammation of his eyes that later affected his inner ears, Cook gradually lost both his sight and hearing until, by the time he was 15, he was totally deaf and blind.

Now 30, Cook has enough memory of how words sound that he is able to speak.

And thanks to an auditory implant that surgeons inserted into his right ear when he was 24, he is able to hear some sounds--the squawk of the family’s pet cockatiel, the honk of a car horn.

But the soft cadences of spoken language remain undecipherable.

So Cook has learned the manual alphabet. Placing his palm over the hand of a person who is finger-spelling, he is able to mentally translate the hand shapes into letters.

He also carries a portable Braille typewriter for people to tap out messages. But the rickety, early-model machine spells out only one character at a time.

Language comes slowly to Chris Cook. But he has found another way to pierce the isolation of his dark and mostly silent world.

Twice a week, Cook spends an afternoon in the Ventura College ceramics studio creating colorful, hand-sized sculptures. Dogs, snakes, mermaids and dragons--the clay figures depict real and mythical creatures that Cook remembers seeing in picture books and on television when he was young.

Some sculptures--such as one of a man and woman embracing--were inspired by dreams, Cook said.

*

While relatives and college staff have already bought some of Cook’s pieces, his latest work will go on sale during the Ventura ArtWalk Friday.

“I just have fun working with clay,” Cook said in his low, gravelly voice. “I feel talented with it. Some people have told me I’m talented.”

Considering the difficulty that a deaf and blind person would have with painting or photography, ceramic sculpture may seem well-suited to an artist with Cook’s physical limitations.

But he resists any suggestion that his art is somehow a result of his being deaf and blind. “It has no connection with my disabilities,” he said. “It has nothing to do with my being deaf and blind.”

Indeed, Cook shares his interest in ceramic art with his mother, Kathy Cook, who travels around the western states to art festivals selling her handmade Christmas ornaments and other crafts.

It is an interest that is decidedly not shared by Cook’s younger brother, Casey, who is also unable to see or hear.

Like Cook, the 22-year-old Casey began to lose his vision as an infant and was completely deaf and blind by the time he was a teen-ager.

But Casey turned out to be athletic like his father, Ron Cook, a Hueneme High School science teacher. Casey competed on his high school’s wrestling team. And he now swims and works out with weights.

Chris Cook, meanwhile, prefers to exercise his imagination.

On a recent afternoon at the ceramics studio, Cook took his usual seat at the table, and a college aide placed a bag of clay within reach of his right hand and a cup of water near his left.

Oblivious to the chitchat of other students, Cook set intently to work. He usually completes one sculpture in less than 30 minutes, he said.

“He’s so prolific,” said sculpture teacher Ellis Jump. “It’s obviously filling a great need for him. . . . Creative people have to create.”

Cook learned ceramic sculpture at the California School for the Blind in Fremont, which he entered at age 14, about the time he lost the last of his hearing and sight.

The firstborn of four children, Cook was a year old when his parents noticed little white dots floating in the irises of his eyes. They later learned the dots were signs of a severe inflammation that damaged the boy’s optic nerve.

*

As the boy’s sight gradually deteriorated, he attended special programs for the blind at local public elementary schools. Suddenly, when he was about 7, he began to have a problem hearing.

It was then that doctors at a San Francisco hospital diagnosed Cook with Vogt-Koyanagi-Haradi syndrome, a disease that typically afflicts middle-age people.

Not long after this diagnosis, Kathy Cook gave birth to Casey.

She wasn’t concerned about the newborn’s health, she said. After all, she gave birth to two daughters between the two boys and neither girl was disabled.

But Casey’s blindness and deafness developed in the same manner as his brother’s. One doctor has since told Ron and Kathy Cook that their sons’ disabilities may have resulted from the unique pairing of the couple’s genetic codes.

Casey, like Chris, has had a cochlear implant inserted into his right ear. But Casey has had more luck with the device than his older brother. He is able to understand speech, his mother said.

To Chris Cook as to Helen Keller, being deaf is harder than being blind.

“Losing my hearing was more difficult because it made communication difficult,” he said.

Now, Ventura businessman Ed Elrod is trying to help make that communication easier.

Elrod, a part-owner of the Ventura Bookstore on Main Street, became interested in deafness when a Los Angeles-based agency for the hearing-impaired opened an office in downtown Ventura. The 40-year-old book merchant began studying sign language and later met Cook through a local sign-language interpreter.

Elrod is sponsoring a sale of Cook’s sculptures at the bookstore during Friday’s ArtWalk, which runs from 5 to 9 p.m. Proceeds from the sale will go toward buying Cook a state-of-the-art Braille keyboard, Elrod said.

*

Unlike the antiquated model Cook uses now, the keyboard allows users to read up to 40 Braille characters at a time--greatly speeding communication. Cook could tote the keyboard, along with a laptop computer, for everyday communication. He could also hook the keyboard up to computers in his programming class at school.

But the keyboard costs more than $5,000, and a laptop computer that could accompany it would probably run another $2,000, Elrod said.

Casey got one of the keyboards as a gift from a local chapter of the Lion’s Club. But considering what Chris Cook says is his life’s goal, it is fitting that his art should be the means for him to tap into the world of computers.

“I just want to be an artist and a computer user,” he said.