17 February – 15 April 2018
This new exhibition by Sarah Tripp, takes its title What The Voice Said from the book The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies by Michel Serres, in which he defends bodily experience against an age of information technology. Part of bodily experience is having a voice and hearing voices. Being heard and being listened to are fraught with risk but also bring the potential for what Serres argues for, a mingling of bodies. This exhibition began with paying attention to voices. The exhibition presents a series of character studies and a hypothetical conversation between two people who are trying to find a way of speaking to each other without restriction, inhibition and ‘regulation’. These pieces of writing slip between fiction and non-fiction; sometimes they are overtly escapist and other times confrontationally ‘real’.
These texts are set against large scale photography by Francis McKee, Isobel Lutz-Smith and Tamsin Greenlaw. These photographs become the sensual home for the texts, giving a space and place to texts which sometimes portray generic characters and everyday observations. Particular phrases turn up again and again in the writing and these phrases become aphorisms (concise, often pithy observations) which have been presented as posters. It is my hope that the exhibition offers the visitor an intimate reading experience, noncommittal aphoristic statements in the form of posters and the very public scenes of the hospital mid-renovation and the street in the early morning when clouded in fog. These images have been chosen as metaphors which suggest both continual renewal and the dense uncertainty of our social and sensory world.
Exhibition photographs by Ruth Clark
This commission was funded by Creative Scotland