Voices in Movement

This sound-led work, funded as part of Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project, by the Leverhulme Trust, explores how the extended, individual narrations of the life story method may be combined to highlight connections and contrasts to other women's experiences across class, ethnicity and culture. In the first half, we hear the conflicted, childhood recollections of Taylor and Jones are counterpointed and reveal how the speakers have revised their memories in the light of their politicization; then a montage of brief clips from other activists forms a chorus suggesting how the women's movement gave them the political tools to understand power relations in their own families. Methods used include an 'relay', where one speaker completes the sentence of another to suggest the collective political consciousness which underpins their analysis of their histories. Found home movie footage of generically stereotypical scenes appears intermittently on the screen but refuses to anchor the oral interview fragments, mimicking the process of memory itself and underlining how the voices themselves are detached in time and place from the visual scenes of 'family life'. Other visual strategies eschew the usual, illustrative function of images for oral histories in favour of a metaphoric use of found footage to underline the emotions and tenor of the stories. The work has had two modes of presentation in galleries and at conferences - as a single screen gallery display (stereo) including 'Picturing the Family', group show Peltz Gallery, 3 - 25 July 2014 (première), and a pilot, multi-channel sound installation, 'Public and Private Memories Sussex University' 4 April 2014 where the respective voices, sound and music were panned to create a polyphonic effect and encourage intensive listening to words, sound and music interwoven with music by Ed Hughes. Reviews and comment: Aesthetica, 1/8/2014; Photomonitor,31/8/14. Feature: Exposure, March 2017; as part of Tall Tales, Touchstone Gallery, Rochdale, September, 2016 Conference presentations: Poetics and Politics of Documentary (Santa Cruz, 2015); NECS, 2015.