My practice is obsessed with language (etymologically, obsessed means sitting opposite to), or maybe I’m absorbed by it (again etymologically I soak it up, I swallow it); I swim in it. I’m obsessed with reading or listening, making a scene for it, beyond the page. So sometimes this swimming takes the form of live performances, performative objects, publications, sound pieces, drawings, textiles, somatic workshops, and various collaborations with others in a relational, dialogic practice.

Most of my works negotiate the presence or absence of a body or voice. I think about how the body can become a surface for writing or publishing, or how specific material objects function as types of bodies. Text is always a point of departure—spreading, leaking, billowing or moving across mediums in juicy and non-linear forms of materialisation.

Most recently, this mark-making in proximity to language informed my Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste (AdK) (2023-2024), for which I developed two new bodies of work: 1) These Devices Became Law explored map-making, utopia, amidst

ecological collapse (queer maps, tender maps, violent maps, indecipherable maps); 2) and and and also played with graphic scores, textiles, experimental audio description, performance (both live and imagined). In this working diary, I will talk about the latter and will share elements of my process and some broader ideas around scores and why they appeal to me as a form or method.

Graphic scores are alternative forms of notation for sound and performance. They move away from the traditional notation of the five-lined musical stave or a traditionally legible script in favour of more expressive, unconventional, and often abstract notations, at the intersection of art, sound, performance, and movement. Given their experimental non-normative nature, graphic scores can remain unfixed, in process, and open to interpretation by and for different bodies and voices. Scores negotiate linearity and its subterfuge: do we read from left to right, top to bottom, following the line of a text, a stave? While linearity is perhaps the direction/form of empire and capitalism, (advertising, news media, instruction manuals, the working world, the military industrial complex, heteropatriarchy) experimental scores tussle with indirect communication, opaque or ambivalent emotional expression. In my case, they are also gestural and therefore point to the performing body. ‘Language has a body and the body has a language’, Walter Benjamin writes mystically and aphoristically. How do we acknowledge not only the body of language but the body that draws this language, imagines its gestures? My own experimental scores and asemic drawing-writings are abstract yet deeply embodied and sensorially rich, and within their abstraction hope to provide a place for non-determined feeling.

and and and also is a series of seven textile pieces that depict experimental graphic scores for imaginary queer voices and bodies, accompanied by two sound pieces, developed as part of my Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste (AdK), they have since been exhibited at Darlington Library.

The work began with a series of graphite drawings as embodied scores, which were then transformed into screen-printed ‘curtains’, embellished with embroidery. In my textile installation, the scores capture so-called ‘Klangfiguren’, a German musical term and a literary stylistic device, which translates into ‘sonic bodies’ or ‘figures of sound’, and brings the senses of hearing and seeing closely together. For me, these Klangfiguren also represent conceptual sounds or allegorical bodies. ‘Allegory’ is a Latin word that originates in the Greek and combines allos ‘other’ or ‘different’ and agoreúo ‘to speak in assembly’. In live,

recorded or imagined performance, these scores find their ‘other-speaking’ in a new assembly or community. Speaking materially, the scores are abstract, gestural marks, interspersed with my handwriting alongside real and invented musical annotation in a Conté pencil.

The marks had 3 provocations:

1. Poetic singing prompts from The Lichtenberger® Method in Applied Vocal Physiology which I learned in Germany several years ago. For instance, ‘Can the vocal chords fill themselves like hefty bags, drooping with water?’ ‘Imagine your tongue is a dolphin.’ Through these questions, areas of the body, including the epiglottis, lungs or the
inner ear, come into focus.
2. Memory recall. How my voice and body feel when I sing. The forms that emerge are therefore both a way to show the imprint a sound can leave in or on us, so they’re a translation of a physiological sensation, but in their textured sensuality they also hope to evoke similar sensations in an audience or performer.
3. Prompts I’ve used in numerous workshops I’ve faciliated over the past few years both in institutional and non-institutional contexts, but specifically, a couple of workshops I facilitated for queer young people through the charity Curious Arts.

Across my practice, I often try to materially and conceptually answer this question: How can a text-based object function as a proxy for a performance: a past one, a future one, or as a performance—an object that performs itself and is not used for something else. Which is something and and and also experiments with. The textile scores are also accompanied by my creative audio descriptions and a short performative sound piece in lieu of an artist statement. As performative artworks in their own right, the audio descriptions ‘more than’ describe the work, they translate it into another medium, imagining what these scores could sound like and what intimacies and sensations they perform. Beyond simply providing access, these sound pieces were, ‘a lush, poetic, evocative sister piece to the physical artworks’ as Richard Boggie (my brilliant access consultant) suggested.

(You can listen to them by clicking here )

Here’s a written extract from the audio description where my writing performs some of thinking behind the scores but where I also perform a new ‘reading’ of them:

Klangfigur II

There are figures on a horizontal plane at the top of the curtain. They look tongue-like, curling, fleshy, but also light, leaping, smooth, as the instruction implies: ‘with the dolphin tongue’, a sound that loosens the tongue from its hold, makes it less weighty or weighed down with habit, and more sleek and slender, expressing an inner verticality. On the next layer down, if we can call it that, and if we continue to read from top to bottom, left to right, we find formations of what could be inner layers of skin, fascia, the connective tissue. Accompanied by thick decrescendos in neon-green embroidery, suggesting tapering, refinement, clarity.

Then an accent, like a swish, then a scribble, fast movement, the pressure of the graphite’s edge. A handwritten prompt: ‘with curiosity’. The thick graphite cube turned on its side, kissing the page, smooshed, dragged, ending in a line that looks like a flagpole, and the dragged shape, like a flag waving in the wind, with embroidered debris stirred up around it. The bottom of the flagpole points at a big shape that looks like an upside-down flower, or a bouquet, an upside-down tree, or a billowing fabric, its curves annotated: ‘with glowing hands’, ‘filled with light’. Diamantine shapes drip off the edges of the tips of flowers. A line that leads to handwriting which curves as if from the edge of a page to even out horizontally, saying ‘the light spreads, the fascia blink up, in a mother-of-pearl sheen.’ 

Klangfigur III

More shapes like drapery blowing in the wind. Or a crunching sound then something drawn out. The sonic instructions read ‘your head fills with’ and then there’s a gap, the text hops onto the next shape puffing in the wind, the mark-making as line-break, and shimmies up its back, its ridge, like climbing a hill: ‘cicadas or bumblebees’. Now we might revise our reading of the shapes as a swarm of insects, occasionally blinking orange and green, a cloud that fills our head. The two shapes below are more architectural, or archi-textual, stark, one has the beak of a duck in profile, but they also look mechanical, like machines that swirl, that whirrrrrrrrr.

The third shape stretches in one continuous movement. It’s opaque, broad, passionate, penetrating, and there is much up and down like a rollercoaster, it ends on a question that flexes upwards, ‘how do we practise?’

The embroidered counterpoint pivots between longevity and brevity, between punctuated beats and lyrical flow.

The next section, the bottom half of the curtain, consists of cohesive shapes that inch forward snake-like, slug-like, as if someone had hauled some flour, or wet stuff, along the floor, making pathways.

The first path stops with a sharp edge, like a cliff, a ravine, or something more artificial, like a bridge. The top of the next sound body has this sharp edge all the way, it borders it, as if the material, like dough, had been pressed closely to it, bulging but precise. Suddenly it looks like the bottom half of a body, legs in flight, running, an elegant prance, one leg kicking up to the bum, the other bouncing forward as if on ballet toes or extravagant heels in drag, embellished with a line of neon orange, setting the floor on fire. Along the thigh, the knee, the text asks: ‘how do you read this?’