OPENING FEBRUARY 2024…

Embodied Cacophonies explores the (dis)organised noise of our genealogies and our future legacies within us. Through this exhibition, I ask how do we have an embodied experience of the cacophony of a place/time/existence? In what ways does our human experience reflect the movement of time, voice, and spirit in the socio-ecosystem in and around Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island?

Upon visiting Lindisfarne, I was immediately overwhelmed by the multitude of voices echoing in the place. The loud-quiet voice of the expansive sky at play with the tide and the North Sea; the still enwrapping voice of the wind as it curled around blades of grass and stone and caressed, kissed, coldly slapped my skin; the legacied voices of Holy Islanders humming like bees as we passed through the causeway; the bellowing murmurs of domestic memory superimposed upon spiritual memory held within the realised imagination of place created.

Shortly after the overwhelm set in, I experienced a sense of being at one with the cacophony. Just as Lindisfarne - the stone and brick building - serves as a container for all of the past-present-future voices that have walked its halls and Holy Island is a sort-of container for the simultaneous interaction of human and other-than human beings, our physical bodies are containers for simultaneous interaction of past-present-future. And it is this place that I would like to use as a departure point for a proposed exhibition at Lindisfarne February 2024 – October 2025.

My work finds its centering within methods of collaborative and ethnographic composition. As a research-based practitioner, I work towards the exploration and creation of endarkened acoustemologies – sets of hearing, listening, and sounding practices rooted in Black and Indigenous ways of making meaning and building knowledge against hegemony. This methodology is grounded in storytelling, interview, and reflection with community local to installation sites in aesthetic conversation with my own auto-ethnographic reflections of the process of working within community sometimes different than my own. The composition Embodied Cacophonies will include local community members' stories and writing from a creative author. To be considered- given the extensive collection available, I would also like to consider use of the collection as potential points to interact with the exhibition.