Poster by Greer Lockyear
This one’s for the
2023
Commissioned by David Dale Gallery and Broadcast with Clyde Built Radio
10 September 2023
‘This one’s for the’ is an hour-long radio broadcast combining live and recorded voice and instrumentals. Drawing on dedications used in both musical performance and literature, this voice craves a connection. Circling and faltering dedications to character types collide with vocal pop pastiches, nonsensical noises, and a cacophonous deluge of instrumental improvisations. ‘This one’s for the’ considers how recurring character types connect with our deepest desires, fears, and values, and can be used to limit a person by denying their capacity to surprise us.
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‘Summer broadcasts is a series of four sound commissions by four Glasgow-based early career interdisciplinary artists currently working with sound, poetry, broadcast, or music. The commissioned works respond loosely to the theme of broadcast as a site for connection and reflection, and are supported with mentorship from local community radio station Clyde Built Radio.’
listen
Stereo audio with HD video projection, 4 minutes
Cracking up
2021
Cracking up toys with the diverging meaning of its title; a phrase that suggests both cracking up in laughter and breaking into pieces. Through the narrative of two characters throwing eggs down a hill and running to retrieve them, bodily paroxysms of emotion, inertia, ceremony, and ritual are scrambled together, rousing the ecstasy shared by both passion and grief.
play
Stereo audio, 2 minutes 54 seconds
Regurgitating
2021
Regurgitating uses the singing voice as a charged outpouring of the body, exploring its association with crying, shouting, pain and healing. Regurgitating explores the residues of others’ voices in our own; the unwieldy rubble of conversations and phrasing that fill our inner speech.
As the singing voice attempts to call out, it is reeled back in and broken down into speech as the mouth’s desire to arrest and communicate – to let something out and let something in – is seized in a cycle of regurgitation. Drawing on research into voice, grief, and narrative, Regurgitating considers the ability song has to stage a scene of sentiment, and to provide an intersubjective site from which to speak.
Presentations include:
Radiophrenia Glasgow (Broadcast 17 Feb 2022)
a thing that remembers itself (Exhibition, 2021)
Stereo audio with HD video, 10 minutes 40 seconds
New sheets (AV)
2021
The narrator’s optimistic mood after changing the bedding is trailed by a series of resolute thuds; setting down a vase, a wheelie bin lid closing, and debris falling from a gaping hole in the ceiling. Their attempt to restore the orderliness of the room is negated as the room and mood deteriorate. Point-of-view is rattled through glimpses and glances, digressions and a heightened self-awareness. Recurring resolute thuds suspend any sense of finality and resolution.
New sheets (AV) is the companion work of New sheets (publication)
Stereo audio with HD video, 2 minutes 19 seconds
Volta
2020
The voice incessantly revises the lyric ‘and if you don’t then that is that’ against a metronome and a centipede navigating its way through rotting leaves. In music notation ‘volta brackets’ signpost a first, a second, or several endings.
play
Stereo audio, 7 minutes 48 seconds
Installation image from A Slip of Certain Measure exhibition, 9-13 Oct 2020
Pictured: stereo audio ‘Dog hairs‘ and sculptural works ‘Found on an island lost in Antarctic seas‘ by Dominique Rivard
Dog hairs
2020
The voice recounts a series of interconnected vignettes of conversations, thoughts and encounters. These segments are formed out of forgotten objects, bits of debris, receptacles and cavities, and draw on the embodied experiences of the narrator – a sideways glance, an object reached for at a stretch, the gravitational pull as they run down a slope. The pace of the voice drags and tightens against various percussive and instrumental rhythms, and occasionally snags on a phrase in the flow of speech.
Presentations include:
Radiophrenia Glasgow (Broadcast 14 Nov 2020)
Market Gallery Glasgow Radio Series ‘Vibration Lets me know you are there’ Episode 3 (Broadcast 27 Dec 2020)
The Naming of Things (Exhibition, 2021)
Stereo audio with HD video, 2 minutes 52 seconds
In her left hand, she clutched a pair of gloves
2020
‘In her left hand, she clutched a pair of gloves’ toys with the orientation and dispersion of selfhood. The audio and the visual buckle into two movements; the unfolding scene depicted through the voice, and the curbed disclosure of the visual environment. The voice recounts a banal scene in which one woman is walking up a hill and another woman is walking down the hill. The aural narrative accumulates through repetition, revision, and the dragging and tightening of pace, as one women drops her personal effects, the other sheaths her hand in a glove. The slow-motion footage draws a vertiginous scene into focus.
HD video with stereo audio, rear projection screen, two pairs of headphones, table and two floor cushions. 16:9, 10 minutes 10 seconds
The storehouse
2019
Produced for the 5-year anniversary of the London/Tokyo Y-AIR Exchange Programme
Combining still and moving images of Tokyo and Glasgow, ‘The storehouse’ weaves together personal anecdotes and observations about urban landscape and landmarks that come out of, or are particular to, the geography of these two cities. The work draws on particularity, negation and approximation, through nonlinear recollections and details of urban parks, shrines, cemeteries, igneous rocks, and the blooming pink Azalea flower.
8-channel HD video, 8x 24″ monitors, 8x Raspberry Pis, I-beam clamp, steel wire, octagonal frame. Silent, 7 minutes 2 seconds
Monument
2018
The camera circles a stone basin with a cast bronze fountain of tritons and dryads at its centre. In slow motion, people congregate and perform around this exclamation point in the park. This footage is repeated and looped around an octagon of monitors, with a short delay between each.
The fountain’s design follows a pattern of enclosure and shrine common to ecclesiastical structures. ‘Monument‘ reflects on political forces residing in and moulding bodies, public space, and built materialities.
play excerpt
Stereo audio on headphones, tilt sensor, Arduino and components, 3 minutes 21 seconds
Birds
2016
The audio is triggered by a listener putting the headphones on. Using recorded narration, ‘Birds’ uses the moving time of speech and deixis to confound the speaker and listener positions in the work. The voice observes two birds looking down a hole in a tree. This image is re-thought through point of view, synonyms, association and tense; whilst shifting the language around what it attempts to describe, the voice continues to affirm; “this is absolutely what we’re talking about“.