Carolyn Craig & Jacquelene Drinkall

7 — 23 June 2019

Opening Reception: 7 June 2019, 6 - 9pm

The Voice Project considers the multivalence of voice as both articulated subject (social and biological) and as pure sound.

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.

Jacquelene has chosen to respond to The Voice Project by curating together some seemingly different artworks that are united in their telepathic suggestion of immaterial waveform, sound and a loose poetics of voice. Her artwork Telepathology, made from fibreglass, resin and laser cut Perspex, can be seen as an exploration of the throat of a decapitated mannequin avatar of capitalism. Artistic-psychoanalytic-psychopoetic attention is given to the throat from which a carefully composed blood splatter oscillates with the symmetry of a waveform that may resemble uncanny 'speech' of arabesque patternation and its unconscious Rorschach communication. This Rorschach is a kind of baroque take on the ‘bloodcurdling scream’.

Jacquelene also speculates that the spheroid symmetrical waveforms of her UFO entrap a kind of inter-dimensional voice from the beyond, and perform the transmogrification of a technocosmic Om into a transparent skull-like architecture. Her work pioneers the exploration of telepathy in art, and this work with telepathy has always been tied, literally and metaphorically, to the intense craft process of weaving with telecommunications wire. Weaving with telecommunications wire is a kind of technocosmic hacking into the voice of technology itself. Thus it seemed essential for this show to include one of her weavings, especially as these reiterate her work with oscillatory arabesque waveform shapes suggestive of sound and prosthetic voice conduits. The weaving is a headpiece from which a woven red droplet-shape hangs from the mouth, another recoding of the proximity of voice to blood and an im/material force that is both inside and outside of the skull.

Jacquelene’s Atlas work combines flat images on paper taken from books and archives on cognitive science, the occult, and recent/current/future brain-computer interfaces for converting speech into techno-telepathy.