BLACK LENS: SHENECE ORETHA & PHOEBE COLLINGS-JAMES

Artists Shenece Oretha and Phoebe Collings-James take us on an extended journey into their inspirations, motivations, approaches and materials as part of the Future Legacies Black Lens interview series.

The conversation

Shenece Oretha: I think we agreed we’re thinking about beginning on the idea of bringing sound together, which makes a lot of sense in terms of how we would work together, because we work together sonically in many ways. I guess you can start.

Phoebe Collings-James: Yes, I’ll start. So, I was really imagining your work that I believe might have been from two years ago, the [In the House of my Love, 2022], is that right?

SO: Yes.

PCJ: It’s a work of yours, in the church, and like with a lot of your more recent work, there was an environment created. There were some fabrics hanging, there were seats placed in a particular way that felt like maybe they were left over from some kind of gathering, and if I remember, there were speakers on some of the seats. The sound [was] the reason why I was thinking of textures and layering, because it was maybe the first time I sat and heard at length many voices and conversations mixed with your original musical productions. It was very familiar to me [as] a language and a way of making sound works especially for artistic spaces, for spaces that I would categorise [where] the main intention is for you to sit in them, be in them and just look. I’m really interested in the codes of spaces.

I love to use the library as an example, because I think it’s quite ubiquitous that most of us know the codes. I don’t think it’s because people always go, ‘Shh,’ in a library or not. Somehow there’s that stillness. There are also, sort of, maybe codes to art spaces, but I was thinking, how did we learn these ways of collaging sounds? I was thinking about it for myself, where I would have first heard that you could sample sound from a film or that you could record people speaking, when they don’t notice they’re being recorded, and you could have music and other things all layered into one. So, how do you approach all of that, and have you thought about that before?

SO: Yes, I grew up, listening to DJ mixes, so, this idea of blending sounds that weren’t intended to be together, My brother was a DJ, and I learnt how to actually mix two songs really well on a CDJ, and then when I came to art spaces, I came to club spaces around the same time, I was around eighteen, thinking about what sound could be in art. In these club spaces I was really enamoured with the ways in which the DJ would blend two songs over each other and form a new conversation in that blend, like a heartbreak of a love song in this beat, and the deep Gabber bass. Yes, it gives that sense of texture, almost the way the heart shakes and throbs and hurts in the texture of the club track underneath, these heart-wrenching lyrics or R&B love songs over them. And then I took that kind of format, the DJ, as an idea, into the art space and started making DJ lectures.

At the time I would listen to a lot of SoundCloud, and there were a lot of New York DJs who would mix samples, speeches, bits of interlude from other tracks into their mixes, and really get a narrative of storytelling going in these, kind of assemblages, in these mixes. I started doing these performances as a DJ, less music actually, and a lot of soundtracks, speeches, poetry, [and] all of those things coming together, that led me into this real love of collective voices. And then I started looking for works that bring together people’s voices and overlap and there was a particular poem by M. NourbeSe Philip; in lots of interviews, she says when she was trying to find ways to read that poem, one of her students asks her to read it, and she says, ‘I will if you read it with me.’ Then in the essay for that poem she says, ‘Zong is a song,’ and then when she does this poem, which I was really glad to be able to also sound out at the ICA a couple of years ago, with her blessing, which I was really happy about, she does it in ceremony and she does it with people.

These layers of voices are something that I’ve always been really interested in over the last couple of years, how to bring this new meaning when two things are overlapping with one another. And then for the show that you’re talking about, the Tin Tabernacle, the show was called In Counter Harmony. When I walked into that space, it felt very familiar to me, because I grew up with a grandma who ran a catering company. We used to go to these function spaces, these hall spaces, these communal hall spaces, and Tin Tabernacle has a rich history, [it] was once a church, but also only temporarily got taken over by sea cadets. And they used to run sea cadet programmes in there, young kids doing games and training and all sorts of stuff. And then after the sea cadets used it, it then became bingo, weddings, funerals, baptisms, all that sort of stuff. So, I was so used to these multifunctional spaces.

As a person who was into the multi-vocal, I was, like, ‘This space is singing with all of these sorts of different forms of sound,’ but I was really interested in the multifunctional spaces, and so for that piece I was, like, ‘Okay, that sound collaging is definitely useful here.’ These spaces are also under threat, because, you know, over the last fourteen years of austerity, you’ve got lots of closing down of the youth clubs and all these, what they might call third spaces, all that sort of thing. So, I wanted to make a real case for the voices and the lives that happened there, but not that it’s a place full of roses, because I’ve seen lots of things happen at these communal functions. You know, they’re both celebration and commiseration, order and disorder, so working with the reggae choir for that work, I would go to the rehearsals and record, and it was really the sonic ways of talking about dissonance. And the term ‘in counter harmony’ was used by the choir leader to describe the ways in which the voices of the choir would work against the soloist and things like that.

I just thought that was such a good metaphor for the ways these community halls work, which is these multiple functions don’t always overlap in a great way. The history of the community hall for the black community who came to the UK, was like the house party [that] became big because we couldn’t get the multifunctional spaces at the beginning. So, all those mixed histories, I wanted to put in there in using this choir metaphor and this assemblage of sound. So, yes, this poetry, DJ lecture, all these mixes of work led me to this sound collage. But you were saying, quite interestingly, that there is another route into this sound collage and assemblage for you. Will you tell me a little bit about it?

PCJ: Yes, definitely. So much of that resonates so deeply. I’m thinking about the bingo hall at Bakers Arms, it’s now a masjid, and the community space on my nan’s estate in Islington, which is still there and still being used, tiny little prefab thing in amongst a very beautiful old brick estate near Rosebery Avenue, and yes, just the memories of being in there, but interestingly about this counter harmony. I’ve really been thinking about words like ‘harmony’, tranquility’, ‘peace’, and how I’m, interested in those states and moments, however fleeting they might be, and their importance and their solitude, often. But in terms of my route into this, sort of, collaging practice, in some ways it’s similar. I think the sonic route through definitely is in growing up in a household with a subwoofer, with speakers, sound system, where music was a priority, especially at the weekend.

So, there was the kind of collaging of sound that comes if one person’s playing Dionne Warwick, and the next person’s playing DMX, and the next person’s playing Miss Dynamite. And then there’s also the collaging and sampling within individual sounds. And then I guess when I first, sort of, had music for myself that was unique to my generation or something, even though I was still a little bit young for it, was MF Doom, Madlib, Fugees, and the interludes in those albums, and Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

SO: Yes, the storytelling.

PCJ: The storytelling that then gives the actual songs even more vitality, and also holds in their atmosphere, so even when you hear an isolated song from Lauryn Hill’s seminal album, I still can hear the ringing of the school bells and the teachers asking the students about love. It’s still in the atmosphere, and then, yes, I guess I was maybe more like seventeen, eighteen, listening to MF Doom and J Dilla, and actually hearing the process, which is probably closest to how I’m actually making sound. I mean, I use Ableton, but then using Pro Tools or whatever, maybe use Fruity Loops, and all sorts to patch together this environment. And I think it was heard commercially most distinctly probably with Dizzee Rascal, like, ‘How do we let you know how life round here sounds?’ And then that getting projected to the world, and we’d heard it from so many other people’s place, you know, around the world, and then all of a sudden it was like a place down the road from us was being projected to the world, and that is really interesting to me.

I went to Goldsmiths, and that environment was very different to anything I had seen before in my life until then. In many ways, I’m still grateful for it, but it also definitely fucked me up. You know, it’s full of the same problems that it has now twenty years ago or fifteen years ago. But there I think I was really interested in the fact that everyone was into film, into digital technologies, and yet there was just no soul. There wasn’t much of what I was experiencing, the art that I had experienced in my life, which was a bit of museum stuff.

Certain things really stick out. One of them is Olafur Eliasson’s sun [‘The Weather Project’ (2003), Tate Modern], because I just remember going there with my mum and sister and I was just laying in there and feeling the heat, so there were these drips of knowledge to know that the National Portrait Gallery wasn’t the only way to make art. But there wasn’t a lot in school to really say how to articulate the things that we’re feeling, because the prism to do that was mainly, and I think has maybe even accelerated now in some ways, to do with a pain profile, or the telling of your identity, your experience, through this prism of pain, of hardship, of the Black Atlantic, in ways that were flattening, ultimately, and not really speaking to this layering, the multiple truths simultaneously that we know to be true. I think that this style of using digital electronic music technologies bring[s] in those layers of sound. I often will record people playing music live, intentionally working with musicians, as well as recording some of my relatives or sometimes recording in public spaces.

I once did a recording in Germany where I was just walking through this tearoom that was very high key and interesting to me, the different people who were in there. I walked from the back to the front very slowly a couple of times and recorded that sound. And for me, adjacent to that are also things happening in films, so a piece of sound that I used that was very poignant to me was Mike Leigh’s barbecue scene from Secrets & Lies, because nothing to me has articulated what it has been to grow up in England in English culture, as well as in being a black person and also being in Jamaican culture, like this moment of this dialogue about sausages. I love that because it does say so much about each of our different struggles, it talks about our pleasures, it talks about awkwardness, it talks about intimacy, and I’m really into that. I think often, if art is supposed to be about the things that we want to dig deeper into, or the things that we want to express, I think it’s a layered thing. And so collaging, whether it’s in printmaking, sound, film, whatever, is just a beautiful vehicle for that.

SO: Yes, I really feel that too, and the multiplicity of our lives, finding mediums to hold that, or that they can’t hold that, they’re always in excess of that, but that speak to it or allow us to point to it, allow us to share in it, I think that’s really important, and I’m glad that we find these strategies to do it in collaging, assemblage.

PCJ: Yes, and one of my friends was talking about gentrification recently, and I think probably, actually, one of the reasons why it’s still happening and we haven’t all just risen up and literally ousted the government and taken over is because the effects of it are not just bad. Fundamentally, they’re evil, and they are another, sort of, wave of colonising, but there are things that happen within it. What if one person got to Right to Buy their council flat and took that opportunity, and the other one didn’t, you know? So, then their house price is going up, but then the other person can’t afford rent, and then realising, ‘Oh, but I did actually like that coffee shop.’ And then everyone’s just talking about house prices, whereas some of us are deeply heartbroken.

If you ask me on any given day about parts of Hackney, Leyton, Forest Gate, I’d be, like, ‘They’re shit holes,’ you know – it was scary. So, yes, I really appreciate this counter harmony. I mean, maybe the first sight of knowledge for this is within our families, our carers. I think even those people who grow up with an abundance of love will have some tricky things in there, right? Because we have to deal with each other, and people have to deal with us, and we have to deal with them.

SO: Yes, real relationships, real relationality, all of those things not being a thing that is only something that we celebrate, you know. I really find it important to think with difficulty, you know, like ideas of excellence always really are both interesting and sometimes harmful, right, when you don’t live up to the expectations and all that sort of stuff, and when you’re coming from a place that you have difficulty to hold. And sometimes even thinking about who’s listening to a thing can really stop you from maybe saying what you want to say, right? I want my work to be able to contain what is truthful in some of these aspects, and that’s why the composition of a choir was super-interesting to me, because it is disparate people. And it’s also reggae, which they’re singing in the choir, which actually has a lot of heartache in it, you know, in the songs that they sing, it’s like ‘Hopelessly in Love’, right? When you’re talking about growing up in London, [there’s] the idea of having hope, but also feeling hopeless. I think London always feels like it’s weighing those two things on the same streets.

PCJ: So, [my] sound work at Camden Arts Centre in 2021 was called ‘Joy comes with the morning’, and I think speaks a lot to what we’ve been talking to. For me, joy comes to the morning brings to mind having night terrors, maybe an argument, maybe just feeling sad one day and knowing that there’s always potential for the next day to bring something new, and that for me being a positive thing. Anyway, so then that is all held within the ceramic bells which dangle from the ceiling, three of them, and they have speakers inside and the speakers project down to bowls of water. Those – the clay, the ceramics – had all been made by me, with some help from a friend of mine actually, Grace, who’s like a superstar thrower, and really put her back out to help me with those bells, but the water, I wanted the sound to be projecting into something. For me, it was really like a meditation on time, on hope, on some anguish and challenge, but also just through this possibility and there’s a shipping rope, a big black heavy duty nylon shipping rope that sits underneath each of the bowls, and then, sort of, weaves throughout the space.

For me, I’m a very spiritual person. I’m a believer. I’m not a religious person as such, but I really believe in these intentional things that we do to surround a space, or to surround something we’re asking people to join us in listening to. So, the speakers were amplified, but also the direction of the sound was controlled a bit by these clay cages that they were in, and the water, I believe, had some resonance sonically. These deep bowls of water beneath, and there were other ceramics in the space, on the walls and stuff, and I was really conscious of how much space the sound takes up. I think it’s always something for curators, that they don’t necessarily think about sound as a material in the space. They just think about the speaker, the movement of sound, this thing that I have a lot of questions about, how it moves through us, especially when you’re working with any kind of bass and sub-bass how that literally jiggles your organs.

I’m curious about your question about how sound moves, maybe geographically now through people sharing music, but also that two-pronged question about this show at Cubitt because what was really beautiful about it, some of these I think steel pipes that are in quite large spirals in the space as well as some steel drums which had seeds on top of them, that also vibrate. Yes, it’s, sort of, like signature of your work, to put these Genelec speakers onto another object to, enhance that movement of sound visually, or the feeling of it, or hold the sound, contain the sound sometimes when they’re in more static feeling, attach more static feeling objects maybe like the chairs. Yes, maybe if you could just speak to some of that.

SO: Yes, just to say the idea of sound of the material and the way it takes up space, is something, and also how it touches people in the space, so for example, you have other things in the room, but you also have to be very aware about how much impact or sometimes it’s like a, you know, it can be touching embrace, right. Or, sometimes it can be like a real-, almost like a warding off of things happening in the space and, in some way, curators are very aware of how much sound picks up space sometimes.

PCJ: Oh, that’s true. The worry of it. Sound bleed. Sound bleed.

SO: Sound bleed, exactly.

PCJ: Which is crazy because they’ll put, like, some big painting that’s, I don’t know, got some text on or it will have bright red or whatever, and they don’t think that that bleeds.

SO: How much space that takes up

PCJ: Impacts you and you take it into the next room.

SO: Yes, completely.

PCJ: Yes.

SO: When you speak about your belief that the water is doing something, you know, that you want to think about the way it’s reaching people and what it’s doing. Like, at this point, in terms of the art that I make I’m really interested in, sometimes I would think about the lost ceremonies that I maybe don’t have because of the way Christianity has taken over as, as, kind of a form in lots of ways, and also what was lost in the Atlantic, right, and then trying to remember or trying to create my own, in my artworks and in my sculptures, forms of ceremony that feel real and true, and sound feels like one of those things that you can do something with. It brings people together, and it feels spiritual, and it has so many layers to it that in my art practice and in lots of other people’s work, it’s doing something. I feel like it’s doing something, and I hear you when you say that too, to think about the idea of the sound of the movement across ocean but also in space. I was really enamoured when I started reading text and literature by black women and I kept on finding this thing where they described sound jumping over the space, and Toni Morrison’s Sula, in the last page, sorry about the spoiler, but the idea of the cry of now being loud and long and it had no bottom and had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. And I was just, like, ‘Okay, wait.’

PCJ: Yes, my whole body is chilled again.

SO: I think there is something about this movement of sound and how it touches people that is being described in this literature that I want to be able to do in space, because I feel like it’s happening to me actually when I’m in the club, when I’m at the party, when I’m walking down the street and the sound is ping-ponging. I feel it and it’s touching me and it’s causing emotion, and it’s resonating in lots of ways, and I want to be able to diagram or draw out some of those kind of things that are happening, undercurrents. I felt like there were a lot of formations like the dance circles, or when we were younger we used to play a lot of games in circles, ring circle games and all those, that I thought, ‘Oh, we’re always making shapes and set for sound.’ And, so, yes, when I started thinking about where I could take the speaker it was very much – at first, it was the speaker is a head, or a voice, or a body, and then I’m going to put it in a way that talks about the shapes that we make, like breathing together and then very much the sound of the speaker looking like a cross fade breathing, and then the sound of a speaker being two voices breathing. That was a work called ‘Conspiracy’.

And then that work at Cubitt, I had over COVID got given an allotment in Lincoln and Seymour Road allotment. I couldn’t work in my studio at the time, but I could work and learn how to grow food, and I’ve always wanted to do that. What I was enamoured by at Seymour Road allotment was the amount of Caribbean people growing food, and there was some talk about some of that food that people were growing being used at carnival for selling corn at Notting Hill Carnival and stuff. And also, again, these ideas of knowledge. Because I don’t have a lot of people above me in terms of my lineage anymore, a lot of people have passed away. And, so, when I get the experience to talk to Caribbean elders it’s just, like, silent happiness, you know. And they were so willing to pass on food growth knowledge that they had been given and it’s just that was really a beautiful time for me. I learnt a lot, and I started to think about these kind of interactions with Caribbean growers as them being seed heads and them dispersing knowledge.

PCJ: Yes.

SO: And then this idea of me, of us being heard unlocking the potential of ourselves as seeds and germinating and growing, and when we come in contact with these good ground of people sharing knowledge. And there was also another thing I noticed on the allotment which is these steel barrels. The steel drums. But there were people using them as incinerators or barbecues, and then I remembered that the jerk pan is also the same type of pan, but as the steel drum, the steel drum is quite an interesting object in terms of industry and then the idea of the Trinidadian heritage of turning the steel drum into the steel pan instrument when the drum was banned. And I was just, like, ‘Oh, and all of this is all here in a garden.’ And, so, for the Cubitt show, I had these pieces of steel that I had got bent that I had left in the garden to rust, and they were weathered over the time, they got that nice brownish on them, and I had written this long form poem about seeds and seed dispersal and the ideas of horticulture that I’ve really mixed up with why people were dispersed in a way; as actually a lot of it comes back to the need for ingredients, and the knowledge of the Black diaspora that they had to grow initially, and then other forms of, what’s it called? Other forms of food, their expertise.

PCJ: Well, also because they couldn’t transport the plants. They tried as they might. They wanted to transport the plants, but they died. They tried all kinds of contraptions, but they wouldn’t last. So, they had to listen. They had to carry the seed instead and they had to also listen to the knowledge of the people who planted the seed first who knew the seed, and this is true of clay traditions.

SO: Ah.

PCJ: Obviously, most recently we know about Dave [Pottery], the potter in the US, who was an enslaved man who was working in a pottery, obviously the majority of African and slave people were working in fields but, or, I guess, the house, but there were obviously many other roles that needed to be fulfilled, and, yes, pottery was one of them, and you were forbidden to write. I mean, you weren’t supposed to know how to write. That had to be a hidden knowledge. You were not supposed to write anything, sign anything, and he did [inscribe his work with poems and his signature].

SO: Yes, the knowledge that they carry with them. The knowledge, the skills that they had were so many of the reasons why they were taken, right, and great that the things are getting unveiled. And then the same thing, you’re learning growing traditions, growing by lunar, growing by the moon and knowing the seed, by hand, and then passing all this knowledge on. People weren’t writing down things for me at the allotment, but they would tell me and they would show me. And I think allotment spaces are really interesting in London, right, because for me I didn’t grow up with a garden and there were very few lucky people in London that grew up with a garden, and it’s an amazing thing. So, I knew the concrete really well, but I didn’t know the land very well.

PCJ: Didn’t you?

SO: It was really a kind of, meditation of what grounding might mean for me as a person who doesn’t know this land very well, but I’m here, right? And, so, yes, on the speakers became seeds and there came seed heads to speak about this growing knowledge that I was getting, but also about the little bit of heartbreak in this relationship between me and the seeds who have been dispersed […] me and the plants who know maybe have a shared history between us. And, yes, the drums that resonate with the seeds on the top and this, again, just sometimes it’s more about the feeling. That idea of these seeds drumming in unison or sometimes on beat. They also drum that beat. So, it’s a bit of mixed history – if you know, you will recognise it in the seed pattern on top of the drum.

PCJ: The one that’s, ‘You Don’t Love Me’?

SO: Yes. That plays in the space, and actually what was so nice is that I put that work out, and every time I came people were doing different things in that space. I like what sound does. It makes space for people. It touches people in lots of different ways. So, some people were meditating in there and it’s not a thing that you get to do in a gallery very much. There were people doing stretches in there. I would just find lots of things every time I came to visit and I’m, again, just speaking to the potential of sound to reach people and do something spiritual or otherwise in this space of art. You know, what can the art do, and can it hold our lives and can it help us and can it help us think and help us feel? And then I think so much about the way clay can be seen as a form of embodiment or working through memory. Can you speak a little bit about it?

PCJ: Yes, definitely, that the clay body is referred to as such. You could talk about terracotta clay body. You could talk about the colour of the clay body, the texture, if it’s got any aggregate in. But you’re talking about the clay body and these things that we use as stand-ins for bodies or that we liken our bodies to, just like the sound collage can often do a lot more to speak to what we want to tell someone about our body than maybe; I’m nearly six feet tall. I think that might give you some information, but it might not be how I necessarily feel in my body. It might not be about how my body moves through water. As a kid I remember someone looking petrified when they saw that I was next to them and we were both about to do hurdles. I finished last, like, apparently my legs wouldn’t get over there that quick. You know, we can do all sorts of things and, so, whether it’s about these, sort of, signatures of the shape of things. So, the speaker having a head and a torso, or the rest of it’s body…

SO: A root.

PCJ: You know, the top speaker and then the middle. I think it makes sense that because something touches our body we recognise it, and also that a body is smell and touch and feeling and listening and, so, things that we also perceive doing those things I think are often close to us. We can often resonate. So, the spiral of the steel attached to your speaker head, you know. I know that seeds attach to animals by having spiral shapes or having stickiness to them or spikes, and so I know that I have a tonsil. I see it when I brush my teeth, and I maybe even feel it sometimes when I cough, and so when I see that little soft bit in the speaker, bubble, bubble, bubble, because something’s so loud, I know what it is.

SO: All low just the same.

PCJ: All low, all low, true, true. I just think that’s really special, and I think something just to say about art in general, maybe, these spaces are our spaces, and I’m interested in the politics of how we change them. If there needs to be a boycott, like, what everything is because people need to be held to account. Change is absolutely possible. But also, running alongside that, because those are often very different warps of time, like, the time it might take to change the Tate compared to what can actually be done potentially, just to be in there with yourself or with someone you know and experience someone’s art. I guess, institutional critique is not one that I delve into a lot. But just to think about, what a white room space might be like: number one, you can change the colour. You can make it orange as you have done. You can change the light. You can change the resonance of the space, the thickness of the air…

I often think about call and response even when making my clay sculptures, the call and response through generations. Who I’m talking to whether it’s just photos or stories I’ve heard of, makers from other, you know, places, from the Caribbean, from West Africa, different places in the world, I feel like there’s a call and response. But there’s a literal call and response when you’re using your voice and someone’s, sort of, speaking back to it, and we wanted to talk about the voice a bit and instruments and maybe we could avoid all. Sorry, but I just zoomed through.

SO: No, I think that’s the right way. That’s the right way because actually, like, so many things that we’re speaking to are touching on each other. They lean on each other. They relate to each other. They move through each other, and time moves through the voice, and moves through the clay, moves through open mouths. Just looking a little bit with this idea of, I was thinking about your work, and I’ve always, as a fan of your work, sat with your hand, kind of, moving through the clay, and the idea of the sgraffito that you use. The idea of the way that you glaze feeling, like painting on the surfaces. But also, that the material holds time.

PCJ: You know, a very pivotal moment in my clay life was meeting Jareh Das who is a beautiful person, a writer, and also historian of the work of Ladi Kwali who was an artist, potter from Abuja in Nigeria and, yes, just, like, a huge inspiration. I was making ceramics whilst reading Michael Cardew’s book, who was a potter who was working in the south of England, studio pottery movement, kind of, aristocrat in rags, all of that moment in the 40’s, 50’s of thinking what it was to have truth to materials and connected to all of those guys. And he was miraculously, by the magic of colonialism, connected to Ladi Kwali via a project, and he was in the West of Africa, in Ghana and Nigeria and all sorts of stuff.

I’m thinking about these things whilst making my thing, then I get a call from this person who is also thinking about these things. It’s not an accident, but she didn’t know that I was thinking about these things and so the magic I absolutely believe in of, like, you’re digging these roots, you’re making these connections, you’re pulling back and forth, and actually, the reason why she’s particularly interesting is that I had been looking at the original, the base for a water pot. It is low fired so it can heat and cool, and it can sit on red earth or sand or whatever. But I am high-firing it. I’m putting glazes on it. I’m putting it through all sorts of stress and strife and strain to make my dream come true, which is that I want this pot to have a throat, a neck, a voice, maybe eyes, teeth, I mean, who knows what, rolling somewhere, misbehaving, speaking, all sorts of things.

I just was thinking about percussion. I’ve read Barbara Hepworth’s biography. It was illuminating. I’m definitely partial to the sculptures, even more, also, to Henry Moore’s story more so than the sculptures. I had a great tour of his studio just outside of London that made me very interested in his politics and approach. The sounds, they were definitely in that truth to materials era of, like, priding themselves on hammering the work themselves rather than getting things fabricated and the sound of that is often really not given space when exhibiting them. The fact that that rock was just bashed for a really long time and, in a way, I feel those are some of things that work is really, in many different ways, like making visible, you know. Like the sounds of things ultimately and the sound of materials, ourselves being also a material and, yes, I really love it.

SO: Ditto, ditto.

PCJ: One last thing that we didn’t talk about was that the work ‘Sounds for Survival’, which I did with Jamila Johnson-Small, us two, kind of, creating it but then inviting in many other people and artists to perform with us and conjure this score together. The original concept was sound as weapon, or sounds for survival, sounds as weapon. I was definitely thinking about the alleged sound of, in Cuba, what was called sound terrorism, I believe, where a US embassy was attacked with a sound weapon that made a frequency that was apparently played by activists, you know, revolutionaries, maybe, to make them sick. So, people had belly aches, people had headaches, we’ve had all these symptoms from this frequency of sound that allegedly was being played, and trying to drive out the US Embassy which just, to me, it seemed, like, such an interesting strategy and also an effective one. You know, the idea of making people crazy in the way that they’re making you, to give them the sickness that they’ve brought to your place.

We’re often making material works and definitely, you know, in the case of Hepworth and others, smashing these rocks to make a form that we can then potentially be in awe of, or regard. And then we’re doing that as performance. This was performance work, a sound work, and then us moving through space, speaking and moving and dancing. In my work, I, sort of, had about four years of not making a lot of exhibitions and doing a lot of this. We toured that work and it, sort of, developed and unfolded and it has been fundamental for how I think about sculpture now, and how I think about the objects and sound and anything that is in the space, how they move, how they relate to each other, and is definitely something I experience in the exhibitions and the performances that I’ve been present of yours which I’m really interested in and inspired by.

SO: Thank you. I was witness twice, I think, to ‘Sounds for Survival’, and I think, actually, ‘Yes, of course I’m a survivor, right?’ And I just think so much so, like, such a good thing.

PCJ: I mean, sometimes that’s all you’ve got and you just, like, keep going and working.

SO: Well, the work itself is the, kind of, embodiment and the practice of that, right? The bringing people together, like, I know some of the people in the performance, and their relationships also, the relationship between performers when working together is a means of survival as well. So, there’s just so many elements to that, but also, the sound very much helps me survive as well, and so it’s the idea of the relationships.

I think in a lot of the things that we’ve touched on, there’s so much related to the type of idea of ‘Sounds for Survival’, but also it’s something that holds us and reaches us and is our relationships in their multiplicity. So, I’m glad you see it reflected in my reply.

PCJ: Yes, we appreciate you. Thank you.

Shenece Oretha is a multidisciplinary artist. To connect with Shenece, see here.

Phoebe Collings-James is a visual artist. To hear more about Phoebe’s work, click here.