Exhausted Vocalities, 1986-ongoing
Live vocal action, acoustic voice, amplified voice, scaffolding pipes, dirt bike exhaust pipe, 30 mins.
Curated by Elyse Goldfinch
Dramaturgical support by Anna Nalpantidis
Photo Documentation: Sarah Walker and Astrid Mulder
Exhausted Vocalities is a vocal action in which the artist uses her voice as a resonant engine—extended through petrol-infused economies, and off-road singing in the form of inherited peasant tongues. She sits beneath a grief ramp, an aspirational instrument crafted from hand-grown crystal and metal, inspired by her collaborator Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes blind, including his ambition to achieve the world’s highest jump. This parallels the artist’s own aspirations as she moves through the many modes of becoming a professional artist in her first major solo exhibition.
Through the intimacy of voice, polyphony, extended vocal techniques, improvisation, and its material extensions, the space transforms into a site for new vocalities, instrumentalities and class relations, where exhaustion, aspiration, and notions of visibility coalesce.