Aria for Woven Voice

My drawings are tools for release and composition. They are moments of sketching that increasingly initiate new processes of thinking during a larger project, be it a writing project, a recorded voice piece, or an installation. They have the advantage that they think about language from the point of view of its physical production, its utterance. Although I have come to enjoy some of the drawings themselves, the point is really less about the drawing and more about the type of gesture or utterance generated. I frequently work in short sequences and this helps me with possible developments. The drawings I stay with are those that carry with them a compositional potential and teach me something about what I could do next. Because the moment of execution is as irretrievable and resounding as a gesture or a voicing in performance, there is a strong energy of concentration and release involved. I use this energy as much as the resulting drawing to process some of the methodological directions of a project.

The Philomel project is singular in my production in that it started with drawing rather than with writing or audio recording and has not yet found its live performance or installed form, though sequences of it are being exhibited as performance drawings. Gesture by gesture, sequence by sequence, showing after showing, I work it out. From the start, I have imagined this project as an aria for a woven female voice. Female voice woven into noise. Female voice trailing its noise. Noise that reveals a voice and its voicing. One can sing, but one cannot speak without a tongue. Once torn from articulacy one must look for another way to speak. The work is both sounding and sounded, live and recorded/installed, because it is this second aspect that carries the trail of the voice and helps generate a new language. It is its hope, its resourcefulness, its revealed strength. The piece is based on an Ovidian metamorphic tale and it is violent, as they often are. The Athenian princess Philomel (Philomena in the Old French version, Philomela in the Chaucer translation used here) is raped by her brother-in-law and has her tongue cut off with a knife so that she cannot tell the tale and reveal her perpetrator. In the sequence shown here, the attention is on the brutal point of cut, on the violent tearing from speech and articulacy, on the last uttered cry.

Philomela (line 2328). Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.

Philomela (line 2329). Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.

Philomela (end line 2329). Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.