November
Some Questions and answers
Tell us a little about the idea you have been developing during your residency?
I have never talked or performed in an active voice before so working with effective Access Support was transformative to my practice because he was filling in the gaps. I began to really look back on my life if you like and noticing all those moments
when people
misunderstood or misinterpreted me.
Since using an active voice in my music or sound art, this has been a revelation for me.
It made me think about my final project way back at university in 2005 where I couldn’t loop a song I needed to last 3 hours. I was too shy and socially anxious to ask for help from the Technicians in the studios who often didn’t understand my questions anyway. My common sense is more tactile than logical and I couldn’t get my head around how to loop it so I recorded myself singing a song backwards for 3 hours using a metronome.
In both my final projects for university, digital audio technology wasn’t what it was today, and I had created live art sound experiences, where I’d filled a little attic cupboard in my kitchen on the 7th floor of a seafront building with sand and invited audiences to sit on the sand and find the objects hidden in them.
Whenever they found an object, they could lift it up to their ears and each time they did, I would speak poetry subconsciously as if I were the object telling them stories and the whole experience was drowned in this song where I sung backwards for 3 hours. For my other project we were given a really large blacked out studio to use and I decided to use the tech room instead at the top of the studio in the ceiling, and filled this room with shoeboxes. The audience had to listen to stories coming through from the studio into the room filled with boxes and hear stories about objects I’d picked up and found on a walk. For both these performances where I used objects my tutors were dismissive of my work.
Yet, when I used my actual naked body in a live art piece and drew all over my skin, stories from my internal dialogue, this is where they became excited about my second skin.
So during this residency, I realised that the secret or power if you like, of my neurodivergent voice lay in the skin of the objects just as my poetry is embroidered, or threaded throughout my neurodivergent’s body, skin or bones.
I say sorry to inanimate objects and treat them like people. I think the residency brought up a lot of emotion and a lot of memory for me about how I feel like an inanimate object, and through personalising the objects, in my final project, I have a better idea of how to share my neurodivergent music more successfully now.
How do you imagine it developing post residency? Post Covid even?
“we just need sound to take people places”
Before Covid I really wanted to make large scale work on large screens and large projections - everything large because I work so small from my bed or bedroom.
My project is attending to objects as humans,
We can take people on journeys in spaces - I need a space.
I think I’ll still be searching for space and I really want to develop a relationship with a gallery or a live art or sound arts festival.
I think I am only accessible through my art and music so now, but now, I feel I can exist outside of my practice and perhaps have an art or music or sound practice…
I also need someone or some body to come on board and act in a more producing role - maybe even an agent or curator, preferably attached to an organisation, gallery or festival so that this making that I do and I do quite prolifically, can be grown effectively and not be so draining as I experience a lot of burn out because I struggle with communication and social cues.
It takes trust though, but hopefully the quality of work I have produced when given opportunities like this residency will help gain that trust.
I think the power of Access and good Access shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s very hard to find effective access especially when you’re a neurodivergent woman and my traits or reactions to barriers are often confused as personality traits, so I think I have really come to realise that working with Ben my Music Tech for access for Drake Music shouldn’t simply end because the residency has come to an end but that he will be my go to for future work and projects because it really was a revelation for me to be heard, to be understood and to not lock out audiences if you like, from my language or music.
My music deeply affects people emotionally, but I also want audiences to also enjoy the experiences of engaging with objects or other elements in new and exciting ways, so I want to retain the tactileness in the way I work and I want to now learn how to form or develop relationships with other galleries, spaces and organisations because I have never been commissioned and don’t know how to approach a gallery or organisation to know how being commissioned works.
I think I want to share my work as installations in new spaces and learn how to communicate more in an active voice, both in my work but also to reduce the significant barriers I experience when engaging with people, organisations and galleries on my own.
I also met a PHD candidate at a recent DM lab who is making virtual spaces to create over Zoom and so however long Covid19 goes on for, I’d love the opportunity to work with him, Ian, to perhaps collaborate or project my live art in his virtual spaces over zoom.
What do you need now?
Trust. And a good commission. Quite often I get to interview off the back of my applications but when I meet people in real life my neurodivergence gets in the way for them. It doesn’t get in the way for me, I can make the work…. But it does for them and I don’t really know what’s to be done about that?
But all I can do is continue to make the work and continue to speak up about what it’s like to be a Neurodivergent woman/womxn through my sound and live art.
Who would you work with if you could, and why?
(I dont know who to say)
- i never got to get to know anyone because I was bedbound for 2-3 years…
Pacitti company - (Spill festival), https://www.pacitticompany.com/ - he’s no longer working there how do i pronounce it - But the company still exists :) “Pa see tea”
I’m always told my work belongs in the Barbican, Tate Tanks
Snape Maltings https://snapemaltings.co.uk/
LADA, https://www.thisisliveart.clive art development agency
Regional Galleries,
Dada Fest
Tate Modern or Tate Modern Exchange
Unlimited
Southbank
Barbican
Where does disability fit into your creative process? Is it different during COVID?
The fact remains that traits that are read in Neurodivergent men as mercurialism and maverick are often read in Neurodivergent womxn as difficult and disruptive and we do speak - I speak in a passive voice which is often misunderstood and misinterpreted in meetings because there is no human connection. Human connection is different to being sociable. I connect very deeply with people and I connect with/to them through my art practice and creative process and so when I’m forced to attend meetings where I can’t be tactile in making or creating or missing humanity, a real life experience, I become quite triggered and overwhelmed even though the human connection and human experience might be too intense for neurotypicals who only want to do small talk but for me small talk is very stressful and inaccessible.
I founded Magical Women which is a Neurodivergent led arts project and this is thanks to my disability because I wanted to connect to more people with adhd and autism and many of whom were survivors of violence like me who found it harder to access opportunities. The art projects that I’ve run through Magical Women have not only engaged us in more accessible ways of making and being but we feel free to express ourselves and our disability - we can stim, we can blurt out, we can interrupt, it’s a really relaxed space and most importantly we can be intense. Things like introductions don’t exist in workshops because we remove the risk found in neurotypical or mainstream spaces - social barriers.