Raising the Voice: Sculptural and Spoken Narratives from the Flat Sheet

Hannah Clarkson

This exposition explores ideas of narrative and storytelling through sculptures and texts raised from a flat sheet, a kind of visual and spoken poetry which is both particular and multiple. In this paper, the key area of investigation will be the relationship between sculptural and spoken narratives in my practice. This is engaged with in four main areas: • The flat sheet and the fold as sites for storytelling • Multiplicities inherent to storytelling • Architecturality and the space between bodies and buildings • Words, text and the voice, and their relationship to sculpture I explore the role of the architectural in the space between sculptural and spoken narratives, both of which are forms that begin with a flat sheet. The research also looks at how one might write about art in order to expand understanding but not reduce it to one meaning, writing around or through objects so as to leave gaps for the imagination and other narratives. The importance of the voice in the telling of these narratives is investigated, as well as the relationship between bodies and buildings.

Introduction // Background // Theory and Context // Methods // Discussion i. Bodies and Buildings // The Pleating Papers // Discussion ii. Spaces and Voices // Other Stories // Conclusion // References and Image List

Discussion ii.

Spaces and Voices

Often decisions about the final form and placement of a piece are made once I am in the space, through trying things out: hanging, placing, leaning, stuffing, draping things in relationship to the surrounding architecture. These decisions are intuitive, material, formal and narrative, depending on the space and the stories it already suggests or is trying to tell. I am often drawn to corners, even in a white cube setting, as these are the transitional spaces, the quieter, contemplative spaces, the spaces often mysterious or forgotten or overlooked. I have experimented with site-specific works, but supports and structures are key to non-site-specific works too. I have been playing with the integration or counter-positioning of more domestic supports that also become anthropomorphic or bodily in some way, such as chair legs, cast iron bath feet or the curved backrest of a loveseat. These give another dimension to the narrative scope of the work.

Materials and spaces also talk to one another. The interaction of metal with sound in a space is particularly relevant when working with the voice and the spoken word. Metal is dynamic in a different way to roofing felt: it is more rigid, yet looser in the way it reflects light and sound where roofing felt absorbs them. This is something I am exploiting by combining occasional spoken word performances with sculptures in various materials, as well as in different architectural spaces with varying acoustic qualities. The voice used as material becomes sculptural in its storytelling power, captures an audience and prompts awareness of the viewer’s own body and breath in space, though it soon dissipates into air, leaving the sculptures to tell their own stories once again. The encounter with spoken words alongside sculpture offers one potential narrative, different to those which might be imagined in a silent encounter between viewer, sculpture and space.

Words, when spoken, are sometimes there and sometimes not. The voice lingers in the air, an inherent tension between absence and presence, then disappears along with the spoken narrative. The voice, and the breath by which it functions engages architectural space in an intriguingly physical way, given its otherwise ephemeral nature. The voice reverberates, bounces off or is absorbed by the objects or walls with which it comes into contact. Depending on the materials it meets, it is multiplied or drowned out, echoed or muffled. According to Connor, certain architectural environments ‘provide a space in which the voice can resound, rather than being the spaces chaotically and unstably sculpted by clamour’.1 The voice vibrates through the whole body of the person speaking and invades the space of the hearer whether they choose to listen or not. The voice is a physical embodiment of narrative, engaging our bodies in stories and places. The breath by which voice is activated is air shared with the very space in which the speaking body stands. The voice is volume, occupant. Connor states that

buildings, like utterances, are articulations of the air. No structure that contained no space, had no cavity in it, could qualify as a building. And yet, though buildings include, enclose and admit air, that air is not thought of as belonging to the building.2

But in breathing in, I take air from the space. Breathing out, I give it back again. Body and space become one in the constant exchange of the air which fills them both. Body becomes architecture and architecture becomes body.

The nature of performativity and singular storytelling is brought into question in the relationship between spoken texts and sculpture. The self-contained narrative of the sculptures is undermined and built upon by the voicing of texts which transform them into a kind of stage set, wherein they are both the environment and characters in the narrative. This is activated in a more phenomenological sense by the viewers’ movement amongst them and through the space surrounding them, even when a text is not read. The experience is shaped in some cases by the sense of there being a front and a back, but in others by a full yet hollow volume to walk around. The use of materials such as feathers, fringing and artificial hair in combination with metal or roofing felt enhances this sense of drama, embellishing both objects and stories.

For it is important that the sculptures stand alone, exist without the texts, and that the texts may stand without the sculptures. They are simply one of many possible narratives formed in relationship to one another. Bal suggests that ‘narrative is centrifugal; it entices you to spin off, develop strands that move away from the centre of attention, from the work of art’.3 Though this is presented as a potential problem, I contest that this could also allow for new readings of the work, as the viewer’s mind is engaged in his/her own memories and associations. Narrative is both eroded and deposited with each new configuration of viewer and sculpture or sculpture, viewer and text.

But sculptures and spaces have their own stories to tell, and I intend to let them tell these tales. The stories may change, dissipate in the airspace between maker and sculpture, sculpture and viewer, viewer and place, reformulate in the no-man’s-land in which they make their unstable home. Untold encounters are inscribed in the very surface of a sculpture; the perilous excitement of not being quite sure edges towards a precipice of heady uncertainty both familiar and unfamiliar, revealing in a sculpture a character all its own. I will simply bridge the gap, fill in the missing moments to help create new memories, new encounters and a new platform for quiet stories yet untold.

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