HOPE

                                                             ‘Yet - never - in Extremity,

                                                             It asked a crumb - of me’  

                                                              Emily Dickinson (1861)

 

Sound performance 

4 X Bird movement scores : Blue Tit, Robin, Sparrows, Goldfinches

Performance costume: hood and wing stick appendages 

 

In the spring of 2021 the artist became a bird watcher, alongside developing an understanding of ornithology and a realisation that the taxonomic and classification system resumed birds, and all non humans, to an inferior other status.

Interested in how birds move through negative space, and how bird song travels, the artist created a system of semicircular shapes and colours to identify and map different bird flight patterns. Relating these to sound waves, they were translated to musical scores to follow through performance. 

 

By taking on a humanimal persona the performer plays at becoming with birds through movement. Hooded and using wing stick appendages, she follows each birds movement score by playing a rhythm on the ground. The sound patterns are reminiscent of birds pecking as they feed, to convey a change in the pecking order. 

 

“By attempting, with my body appendages , to follow each bird's movement score I am trying to show how sound in its frequencies enables interspecies connections and entanglements. As the sounds made by the wing sticks travel through the air, and rhythms echo on the ground there is a change in the pecking order. In those moments of colliding motion everything is connecting through interlocking frequencies. There is no division of species , no commodification of being everything becomes part of nature's polyphonic symphony."        

                                                       

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