An extension of my interest in the relationship between the human voice and internet, this short audio piece imagines how the sprawling landscape of contemporary social media might alter a future understanding of lingual nuance and human feeling, thanks to the brut simplicity of its taxonomies. When gathered, trawler net style, the grandest and most complex of emotions may be reduced to a confused jumble of motivational jargon and recipes for cake - empty mantra that stick in the throat. 

First resented as part of Dark Matter Gushes From The Mouth And Into The Open Air at Guest Projects in April 2017, and exhibited throughout June 2018 at iyd.nu as part of SHELL LIKE’s six month takeover of their programming.

(57)#passion (2015)

Commissioned by Bethan Lloyd Worthington for the exhibition and book 'Windswept Baby', presented at V&A London in 2018. 

Windswept Baby is a collaboration between artist Bethan Lloyd Worthington and six writers and poets – Lucy Biddle, Amy Pettifer, Kayo Chingonyi, Luke Turner, Megan Nolan and Jack Underwood. New writing prompted by objects in the V&A ceramics collection, with artworks by Bethan in response. The work was on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum from May – August 2018. Limited first edition of the book available at windsweptbaby.com

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Windswept Baby

O (2018)

No Closer relates the passage of an ill fated infatuation unfolding over a series of too hot afternoons. Both personal reverie, and collective day-dream, it resembles an off-key symphony composed in the head by a heart  at the point of no return. The speaker flits between differing states of intoxication and reverie - the clear melodic swim of radio love song at odds with the real-time mouldering of desire - souring like milk left out in the sun. Emerging  in fragments, the narrative sometimes speaks from hurtling moments of want and unquenchable thirst, spiralling without a ledge or other body to cling to. Other times a tenor of heavy resignation trembles - sweat slicked words glistening at the corners of the mouth. The final turn of the radio dial is a wilful drowning out of crushing reality - ready to be fooled again to the tune of a slightly different song.

First presented at SHELL LIKE #4: The Mouth Takes A Bite Out Of This Cruel Summer at LUX, London in September 2018.

The Mouth Takes A Bite Out Of This Cruel Summer

NO CLOSER (2018)

Catastrophia is an audio work that takes influence from the question what happens when the present itself becomes an interval? posed by writer and theorist Yve Lomax in her 2004 book ‘Sounding The Event.’ It considers, and attempts to sound, the differently temporal landscape that exists between two moments. Between wanting to speak and speaking, specifically at a crux point of amorous encounter. Experience is not guided by a slowing down of regular time, instead it is possible to feel a different rhythm operating, something fractured, both of and other to the body.

In ‘Notes on Gesture’ (1992) Giorgio Agamben observes ‘a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures.’ This work considers the conditions that might give rise to a catastrophe in the sphere of the voice - the shattering of what we mean to say as vocal control is overridden by emotion. We blurt. We waver. We stammer - I love you.

The ‘time’ of this vocal catastrophe is something like the sticky lag of dreamtime. Something like a nightmare that jolts you awake - in which you see cracks appearing in reality. In which the earth moves.

This work was created for Stucco Echoes Mouth, a Trembling of the Frame, an event for Peer Gallery, London, hosted by Chris Timms.

Amy Lay-Pettifer