Carving A Derive

with Carolyn Craig

9 June 2019

Join Carolyn Craig in creating a collaborative artist book in response to a short walk to GOMA, where the images and sound recordings you make will contribute to the project. Using the theme of the body and the spaces it inhabits, participants will produce a small image on a relief plate. Each of these works will be collated into a small artist book combined with pages of text that reflect upon the ideas generated in the workshop.

Carolyn’s interest with voice resides within its social habitus—how it is read as a coded substructure of capital (power—gender and class) and whether this scripted tonality can be subverted—misdirected or inverted through performative strategies. For Outer Space, swear words have been harvested which are then played back over petrie dishes of acidophilus bacteria. This bacterium is chosen as it has a strong symbiotic relationship to bodily health and is absurdly suggested to go into women’s vaginas when they have thrush. The resulting bacterial growth is a sound print. This trace of the spaces between bodies in society neuters the swear words to become a subversive act of resistance. These same words are taken through a series of digital processes to generate 3D prints. Each expelled breath emancipates what is perceived as low class phrases (of violence) and neuters their power over the subject herself. Swear words demarcate the edges of value between subjects. The relationship of these words to the lived body is a symbiotic autobiography and the frequency of these words over a girl’s body can measurably reflect their social standing within the western body/capital system.

The workshop coincides with Carolyn’s joint exhibition with Jacquelene Drinkall The Voice Project, running from the 7th – 23rd of June, 2019.