by S a r a h N y e a y
Es
‘THEIR VOICES HAUNT AND TIME REPEATS.’
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VOICING THE SILENCES The act of giving voice to the silences in history that fill the places where women ought to be, has long been at the top of feminist agendas. For many feminists, recovering lost histories has been part of a larger project drawing women in from the margins to a more central and visible place in cultural and political life. Within this context, a consideration of the literal places women inhabit in everyday life is also important. Lucy Reynolds’ work, both as an artist and a writer, focuses on both these concerns, looking at the relationship between the collective and singular work of women artists, while also considering the traces left in those spaces where they were once present, and how they might be registered and recovered. Reynolds’ recent project, A Feminist Chorus, does both. Developed in collaboration with MAP, A Feminist Chorus was comprised of events and installations in three distinct Glasgow locations, each bearing their own resonances with the history of women artists in Glasgow. This included Glasgow School of Art’s narrow, sky-lit corridor linking the studio historically used by female students and known since its early days as the Hen Run; the premises of the Society of Lady Artists’ Club located at 5 Blythswood Square from 1895-1968; and lastly, the new Bridgeton premises of Glasgow Women’s Library, an organisation that has played an important role in the support and celebration of women artists since its establishment, first as Women in Profile in 1987, and as Glasgow Women’s Library from 1991. Building on Reynolds’ focus on women artists and the spirit of collectivity, the chorus was performed by librarians, volunteers and members of Glasgow Women’s Library: a number of writers and artists based in Glasgow: and students currently enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. The score itself, which was created with the intention of being adapted and performed again by different people and in different contexts, consists of a collage of texts and extracts of texts taken from an array of sources, from archival documents relating directly to the Society of Lady Artists’ Club to chorus members’ personal text selections, which range from well-known feminist writers such as Virginia Woolf to filmmaker Margaret Tait’s graceful poetry. The
relatively disparate texts, when read in turn alongside one another, and often over each other, are placed on equal footing as a collective assemblage, rather than foregrounding any sense of hierarchical reading. The project as a whole took place over the three different venues to form a fragmented chorus across the city. The live evening performance event at Glasgow Women’s Library drew together all three parts of the score into one chorus—the library members’ selected texts spoken alongside the texts from the two sound installations at Glasgow School of Art and Blythswood Square. The sound installations were housed in intimate spaces, the art school’s Hen Run corridor and a phone booth designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh under the staircase in the entrance hall of Blythswood Square (now an office building). In terms of size, but also symbolically, in the sense that they are both places of transit resting between the predominant spaces of activity in the buildings they reside in, both make an overt statement in relation to the women who inhabited those spaces in the past, and their relationship to their own contemporary world and their history. The two locations, the hallway and the phone box, are both symbolic of a means of moving across time—the passageway symbolising a pathway from one life to the next and the phone box regularly imagined as a means of time travel. In these intimate spaces, the histories are overheard and partial, never able to be fully recovered. The recorded voice carries with it an uncanny presence. The telephone, with its ability to separate body from voice, was also historically viewed with suspicion. In the everyday working environment of both locations as art school and business offices, the installations serve to unlock pockets of the past that have been silenced in the archives, functioning as a kind of archival séance which gestures towards the potentially residual effect of its previous inhabitants. Their voices haunt and time repeats. Much of the content of these two installations focuses on the recounting of what might seem rather mundane
everyday detail. In the phone booth’s portal to the past, contemporary voices read out reviews of exhibitions in the Glasgow Herald and minutes of the Lady Artists’ Club committee meetings—new flooring is laid, exhibitions are planned. In the Hen Run, class registers held in Glasgow School of Art’s archive are recited, listing the students’ names, addresses, fathers’ occupations etc. Both soundtracks and the live chorus at Glasgow Women’s Library begin with a quiet trickle of one or two voices before building into a wild rush and then ebbing away again. Taken individually the voices are measured, dispassionate even. But when the voices are most densely layered, the sound seems forceful and passionate. Each piece of information from the archive, from lists of addresses to lists of paintings, holds a clue to the past. It rushes past in a barrage of voices, in a kind of ‘archive fever’ that seems to promise that if you listen carefully enough you might unlock secrets from the past, trigger the telling of their stories, divine the past from the lists of everyday details. The act of giving voice to both well-loved and forgotten figures is an act of celebration, but one that is tinged with melancholy. When the projection of the chorus is at its loudest there is a sense of the magnitude of what is lost in the silences of existing histories, of the voices that will remain lost in the archives and never fully recovered. There is likewise a sense of loss in witnessing what could be seen as a catalogue of work, of cumulative frustrations, a collective struggle. A real strength of voice is captured in the chorus— bringing together many admired and also unknown women, many of whom had struggled on their own in unsupportive environments, into a virtual collective space. But at the heart of A Feminist Chorus, and much of Reynolds’ work, is a concern for recognising and connecting with past generations of women artists, as well as nurturing a sense of the collective in the present day.
Dr. Sarah Neely is senior lecturer in Communications, Media and Culture and a member of the Centre for Gender and Feminist Studies at the University of Stirling.
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