| Project title: | All-Ears Art Project |
| Location: | Quaker Meeting House, Hammersmith, London, UK |
| Date(s): | July 2024 |
Artist Statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist based in London, working across various media, including fine art, sound, and video. The essence of my creative practice lies in uncovering and exploring spaces for the unheard, unknown, and unseen. My work is deeply influenced by the Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821), particularly his concept of negative capability, honouring the unknown while revealing hidden truths within and around us.
My recent projects are grounded in socially engaged methods, focusing on caring and empowering marginalised cohorts through artistic practices. Unmasked Voices (2023-present), gives voice to marginalised clinicians within the English National Health Service, by exploring their unseen profiles and unheard narratives. Clinicians Out of Hours exhibited at the Royal Society of Medicine in London (2023), focused on re-humanising clinicians by exploring their approaches to creative practices, whilst my recent project, The All-Ears Art Project (2024), amplifies and projects clinicians’ unheard feelings and stories to wider public audiences. This latter project involved poetry and performance alongside sound motifs to create a soundscape capturing clinicians’ emotional experiences, amplifying their often-unheard silent struggles. Using performative and deep listening methods, I invite the public to bear witness on how the socio-political context shapes the health of health workers.
My interest in clinician welfare stems from a prior academic background in health system functioning, as well as observing the unhealthy contexts of health care workers. My practice intersects art and medicine, focusing on the healing attributes of creativity.
Contextual Statement
The All-Ears Art Project presents a 15-minute soundscape of unheard poetic narratives of four fictional NHS clinicians, exhibited within a site of silence, the Quaker Meeting House, Hammersmith. It focuses on revealing the unheard voices and untold narratives of today’s clinicians, whilst releasing these into public listening spaces. The NHS is plagued with systemic workforce inequalities with clinicians often fearful to voice their concerns. The All-Ears Art Project uses artistic practices as acts of care and medicinal mechanisms to improve the welfare of clinicians. It draws on poetic, performative, and Deep Listening (Oliveros, 2005) practices to actively unmask the feelings and narratives of clinicians.
The soundscape is surrounded by silence, inviting audiences to engage deeply, holistically, and reflectively with the clinician characters. The mere act of listening empowers, by allowing the “inner experience” to “manifest and be accepted by others” (Oliveros, 1974 in O’Brien, 2016). Visitors were invited to engage with the four fictional characters and associated sound motifs harmonising with their moods, socio-political contexts, and emotive transitions.
The project employs generative poetry trained on the voice of 19th century poet John Keats, to bestow poetic agency to today’s health staff. By becoming Keats, current day clinicians are empowered to express their voices and feelings, whilst transitioning from a state of “fact or reason” (pp. 48 Colvin, 2011) to a space for “uncertainties mysteries and doubts” (pp.48. Colvin, 2011).
