Friday 9 December 2022

Cheryl McGregor responds to 'Chimera: Levitating Tongues'






On Screen: The yellow thread hangs from the ewe. 


To ask me to unleash my beast is to request of me to unlearn and disrobe.

To skirt around the outskirts of sound, not distressed but disquiet. To be receiver. 

To take inventory.


            Did you hear the animal in pain? Crying for their mother? 


            The mock and the mimic stand in the centre of the room, facing each other.  
            With extended arms and open throats 

            Shaking at each other. Panting.

            A croak, and a forward step. 

            A question : What is stuck in the throat? 

            Another question: how does a rolling sphere sound like the ocean? 


            Why do so many sounds sound like the sea? 


            An interruption in the form of a ringing telephone, the beginning of another impossible
            dialogue, a passing back and forth, a hot potato. 


            ‘I can’t see’ says the child,

            ‘Hey kid, this is the sight of sound.’



            (A whistle) (machine static) (skirl) (warble)

            (A laugh)(a bark)(a barking laugh)

            (A suck) (a tut)     

            (A flapping of something organic)

            (something internal) (a tongue)



            Levitating: 


            the sound ascending


            Its makers are traveling up the staircase. 

            Its making us travel up the staircase. 


            L’esprit d’escalier


            Feels like: A game 

            Feels like: A bear hunt



            A hunt sound-tracked by persistent percussion,

            the battlefield drum.

            And us: a congregation composed,

            Syncopated spectators.


            (A chime) (a ring) (a din)

            (And then) (nothing) 


            Relief.


            Sometimes making noise is harder than making music.


            The kid chimes in again.

            ‘Mama’ He delivers a crisp clear quaver. 

            Aside: ‘What is it?’ 


I see this interaction. It is brief but I see it and I think about when sound is verboten and when it is encouraged and when it is impulsive and when it is all of these things at once. I think about sound like instant. I feel about sound like instant. 


            What is it? Another sound pulls me back.

            A rattling, like stones or bones:

            A sonic solidity.


            Sound moves through bodies, bodies that are:


            (Worrying) (sanding)

            (Agitating) (soldering)


            In front of me.

            In front of witnesses.

            This sonic construction site:    

            Whistle while you work.


Having worn your duty of silent spectator, felt its collar digging into your neck, closing up your throat now we invite you to Disrobe. Disrobe. Disrobe: This cacophony is communal.

My hand drops pen, extends, receives a bronze bell. The crazy song started, everyone in rebel chorus - alarms with no fear - I passed the bell to the person behind me, smiled at the face of resistance and reached for the pen again. 


            What sound stands out?

            Will someone answer the door? 




            Finale: 


            the uniform clap

            the thank you gesture

            the blood returned.


            The sound’s strange exit and the ear’s faint ring.  


______________

A response to the performance and screening event Chimera: Levitating Tongues by composers Ceylan Hay and Shiori Usui. Part of the series of events accompanying Nashashibi/Skaer's exhibition Chimera at Cooper Gallery, 30 September – 10 December 2022.

Cheryl McGregor is a student on the English Literature MLitt in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law. This response is made as part of the module Voice & Text.

Follow 
@cherylmcgregorwriter on Instagram for more writing. 


Wednesday 23 November 2022

Hanna Bratlie responds to 'Chimera'


 









I Walk Through  

 

Projectors, stairs and lights  

I walk through  

 

 

meeting myself as a shadow 

the sheep feel it too 

being over painted  

being film

I walk through  

 

rolled out, projected, pinned to the wall  

screaming  

an altar waiting  

light on either side  

I`m standing in between  

dragged out  

made flat 

stretched out  

poked at  

heavy stones grounds the pouring red 

 

I walk through  

  

an empty wall  

a resting place  

until a scream reminds me  

that it breathes  





______________

A response to Nashashibi/Skaer's exhibition Chimera at Cooper Gallery, 30 September – 10 December 2022.

Hanna ValsgÃ¥rd Bratlie is an MFA Art and Humanities student at the University of Dundee. She completed her BA in Philsophy at the University of Oslo. Philosophical analysis and creative writing are important influences in her artistic practice which revolves around the concepts of space, intensity and experience. With a particular emphasis on the materiality of objects and their transformative aspects, she works in between the conceptual and the material. 

Images: 

Above:
Nashashibi/Skaer, Chimera, 2022. Installation view Cooper Gallery entrance.

Below:


Floor: 

Lucy Skaer, Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay, 2022

Bronze and pigment, pigment on brown paper


Projection:

Nashashibi/Skaer, Bear, 2021

16mm film painted with ink and transferred to HD with additional digital drawing by Regina Ohak
Single channel, colour, silent, 5 minutes


Photographs by Sally Jubb.


Tuesday 22 November 2022

Jamie Donald responds to 'Chimera'

 

What is a garnet? Is it a bird?

-
A sheep is a ruminant beast, as in, it has a four-part stomach, along with molars, throat, intestines. A ruminant digestive system: it chews, swallows, regurgitates, chews again. It ruminates—same word. I didn’t know this before.
I suppose I enjoy a show that does not immediately reveal itself. The satisfaction of a slow grinding of the teeth. Movement and texture and pressure on a surface—each attempt a different grade of sandpaper, digging.
-
(Lucy Skaer, Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay, 2022. Bronze and pigment.)
I don’t know what a garnet is. I look it up on the first day of the exhibition.
It’s a rock. Dark red, blood red; garnet as in a grian, as in a pomegranate seed. Pulled, seized, extracted from dense rock encasements, its surface can be hewn, tended and smoothed until it appears, pristine, as a perfect gemstone. When crushed into a sand it can be blasted with water or air to cut or smoothen other objects. There is also garnet paper—like sandpaper, but more resilient—that produces an immaculate finish on hardwood furniture. I find some images of this stuff. High mounds of a fine, burnt sienna crumb.
It also arises in green, yellow, gold. The garnet family is one of the most complex in the gem world. It is not a single species, but is composed of multiple species and varieties. You can buy a tonne of it for £700. 
Geologically speaking, garnets can serve as breadcrumbs, laying a telling trail, here be diamonds.
On the day of the show's opening I have to find diamonds—the ones that come finely crushed and encased in soft silicone pads for smoothening stone. Gems of another kind lead me to a source. Skaer uses the pads to polish scratches out of the top of two heavy, stone sculptures.
(Lucy Skaer, Slate Night (I &II), 2022. Stone, chalk and pigment.)
-
(Nashashibi/Skaer, Lamb, 2019. 16mm transferred to HD)
The film downstairs, Lamb, I can see and hear from the invigilation desk.
The film shows intimate footage of ewes and lambs during lambing season. A wretched, tense, corporeal drama, heightened by a soundtrack of wailing human song. Alert to voyeurs, the sheep watch back with long, sharp, emerald-cut eyes—alien, steady, discerning.
Thick wool is stained by a wash of blood. On golden straw a labouring ewe keels her head back like a dancer; she stands, collapses, heaves. Mother, sack, fluid—with muscle and tongue a lamb is hewn from its conceptive encasements.
Another ewe scratches, paws into the straw and dirt around a newborn, determinedly scraping a divet in the muck. It appears as though she is searching for something else. She rubs her nose deep into her lamb’s scruff.
scruff (n.)
"nape of the neck," 1790, altered (by influence of scruff "crust") from scuft, skuft (1787), a provincial word of obscure origin [...] Another theory holds it to be from a metathesis variant of scurf attested from late Old English.
scurf (n.)
late Old English scurf, "scaly or flaky matter forming on the surface of the skin," also "exfoliated epidermis," earlier sceorf, from Proto-Germanic *skurf- [...] probably related to Old English sceorfan "to gnaw," scearfian "to cut into shreds".
-
In moments of distress or anxiety I scrape away the skin around my thumbnails. I do this less vigorously, now, as I think. And my scalp, I am always scratching my scalp.
Scratching, I suppose, is a primal expression of dissatisfaction. Maybe I am hoping I will find something else underneath.
-
(Nashashibi/Skaer, Bear, 2021. 16mm film painted with ink and transferred to HD, with additional digital drawing by Regina Ohak.)
It is a few days before I spend time with Bear, upstairs—five minutes worth of 16mm film that has been worked into, worked onto. Footage of the same sheep, a new year. At the artists’ talk I hear that sandpaper was scuffed across its surface, adding-to and removing-from the image leaving bright thin grazes that mark the motion of the reel. Dark blotches of ink appear around the wounds—bear-shaped cloaks seeping over the other beasts; flickering spectres of another being. 
We see a lamb, bloodied. It is wearing the skin of another, dead lamb like a shawl—its back on its back, its legs inside its lank, hollow legs. I imagine this other lamb, now lying somewhere off-screen in the dirt, its raw pink tissue and sinew exposed. I find and read a blog by a shepherd to try and understand this process, called ‘setting on’, that comforts ewes whose lambs are stillborn. Her love is enshrined in that mutilated skin—licked, nuzzled, smelled.
Loss, gain; addition, subtraction.
I wonder, if I died, would they scalp me.
-
(Ceylan Hay and Shiori Usui, Chimera: Levitating Tongues, Thursday 20 October, 6-7.30pm. Vocal performance.)
Among these films, Hay and Usui’s tongues do not levitate, but recede, foregrounding the throat with scraping coughs and croaks; with coarse, glottal cracks and stutters. The sound is visceral, like infection. People wince. 
The sound shifts, coughs become barks, the audience is hounded as a flock up the stairs to see them transform, again, as to the beat of clunking wooden hooves they snake and weave across the space, and, transfixed, we follow.
We are all sitting. Usui plunges to the ground behind me, begins scraping a pad of wood across a long roll of sandpaper on the floor, feverishly, heaving her whole body in the movement. Desperate, pleading, it makes a sound like waves of crunching static or air forced through clenched teeth. I am elsewhere, thinking of Cinderella on her knees—singing sweet nightingale and scrubbing the floor.
A gradual cruciendo, instruments scattered across the floor are seized, sampled, and offered to the audience. Variations of serrated wood, taut skins; chimes, scrapers, whistles; strange whooping tubes and deep gulping drums; croaking frog purrs along dry rough tongues; impacts, frictions, a swell abrasions.
-
A couple of weeks into the show, invigilating, I am watching the CCTV. I look at the two long rolls of paper on the floor: pale pink, with staining washes of brown-red pigment. I think, maybe this is the colour of the underside of skin. These, then, two great long animal hides splayed out to dry on the floor, gently curling up around their edges.
I find a video on Youtube, how to flesh a deer hide. It involves scraping, sweating, scrubbing, insistence. Cognitive dissonance. You really want to be putting your energy into that spot, right in between where there is not flesh and where there is flesh. There is a special tool, and the woman in the video’s has cute pink and blue leopard print handles.
Looking back at the CCTV, I have a memory. The aftermath of a fatal motorbike crash, witnessed as a child. Whispering with friends in the bushes. A long sienna swathe along the rutted asphalt.
I think of grit in bloodied knees. I think of sandpaper, of different grades.
(Lucy Skaer, Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay, 2022. Bronze and pigment.)
-
______________

A response to Nashashibi/Skaer's exhibition Chimera at Cooper Gallery, 30 September – 10 December 2022.

Jamie Donald is an artist, writer and invigilator and events assistant atCooper Gallery, DJCAD. She is Head of a Few Different Things at Wooosh Gallery—the best gallery in the whole world—and recently separated from GENERATORprojects.


Images courtesy Jamie Donald.

Top: 
Nashashibi/Skaer, Bear, 2021
16mm film painted with ink and transferred to HD with additional digital drawing by Regina Ohak Single channel, colour, silent, 5 minutes

Below:
Lucy Skaer, Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay, 2022. (detail)
Bronze and pigment, pigment on brown paper