SING IT ON A FRIDAY (2020)

"Sing it on a Friday" is an auditory portrait of a group of people who come together each week to sing and be together. The sound installation aims to reflect back our experience of being part of it, an artefact of the ephemeral moments of the much-treasured rehearsal space. For this collaborative piece, Emma Brown and Lisa Fabian joined the Platform Singers community choir for several months. By closely working with the group as both participants and observers, this process attempted to prioritise and give value to the creativity and autonomy of the group. The soundscape consists of an assembly of fragments that are played in and out of synchronicity, on a six-channel sound installation. Being part of this warm group for an extended time allowed us to pick out the emotional experiences that moved and resonated with us most - the community, humour, harmony and relationships within the group. The installation mimics the welcoming space that is created by this gathering of voices in the warm rehearsal circle and aims to share it with the wider community.

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Untitled (2019)

Here I am again, crouched, head down, fingers pushing out white putty into the tarmac, covering dulled greys of old chewing gum splotches with bright white porcelain that looks freshly chewed. People pass by, if they see me they verve round the dots that litter the hill. I’ve never known what it means, tracing these accidental decorations to the street. It feels the most natural place to be, kneeling in determination and red velvet, with strangers asking me what I’m doing. But that book was right. The street is the every day. The patch of land between the home and work and all those other places. I wonder if other people look down while walking, like I do. Perhaps I won’t be able to collect the imprints of the people like me, who cautiously place their feet upon the earth, avoiding any mess on hard concrete soles. I only capture traces of the people who haven’t noticed. The watchful go by unrecorded, too vigilant to leave a mark. I map out all these human-made marks on the street, visible and available to answer questions, I go back and remove the porcelain imprinted with unknown shoes and wheels, fire it all together in a big kiln until its hard and shiny and beautiful and chirrups when you hit it with a high fine singing note and then…

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SUBWAY PIECE. SEVEN STOPS (2020)

Information notice displayed to the public: “There is a person in this carriage singing. We are making a film together. It’s about how you can sing at the top of your voice when the train is screeching loud and rumbly and nobody can hear you, not even the person sitting next to you. The video will be projected, sound loud and quiet, faces blurred, very small and very bright.”

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THE LADY IN THE TUTTI FRUITY HAT! (2019 - 2020)

After working as a life model I started this project thinking about the politics of being drawn/ represented. In a series of life modeling performances I use a large prop fruit hat (a huge bobble hat, made from wool, in the style of a Carmen Miranda fruit hat; with grapes, pears, apples, oranges, kiwis, lemons, peaches, a honeydew melon and a watermelon) and a series of poses to explore how a female model presents herself, and how she is seen.

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It’s pretty hard to put a collection of work together like this. How to show work is something I think about a lot. There’s a kind of boring inevitability about having to go back to the gallery (or the online showcase) to legitimise your experiment, observation and work. Because the work isn’t designed to be an image. Or an mp3 file. Or a video. It’s something to be experienced, and then has to find a form that fits itself, and be documented in a way that makes sense too.

I feel very lucky to be able to use my life like this, everyday has many moments, which could be experimented with, discovered, extracted, examined and re-imagined.

One year I decided I would give every single person I saw in a day a genuine smile. And to greet every single person I saw the following day. The document of this work can be many things, a book, an image, a poster, a video, a long recording for the radio. But that’s not so important, it’s an experiment in living, one that anyone could try. This year I have enlisted others, to not make myself the only ‘everywoman’ in my work.

Many of these ideas are works in progress; I’ve not completely worked them out yet. I’m always a beginner (in material, constantly learning a new skill or technology or subject) and my projects are like a navy of intrepid enquirers. I want them to travel down many different small tributaries to navigate this vast world. Sometimes I feel very excited by this potential. And sometimes I feel very lost and uncertain.

My work finds value in the in-betweens and the everyday. That’s where I think a person’s value ought to lie too, in the way they think about and relate to other people and the world around them.