HOCKET
Video installation with performance by Fiona Kennedy, 2011
Hocket was developed during a residency and solo exhibition at Market Gallery, Glasgow. It picked up on ideas first explored in the text Call & Response, particularly the idea of making oneself a resonating chamber for other voices, a form of solidarity and assistance which is an inviting analogy for collaboration. The central element of the exhibition became a video made as a score to be sung, incomplete until it is performed. (This ‘score’ was approached more like an action that solicits a response than a set of instructions for the performer.) At the opening of the exhibition vocalist Fiona Kennedy performed in response to the score; this performance was recorded and subsequently accompanied the video in the gallery.
In the Inuit vocal games that provided a model for the work, the sounds made by the participants allude to events, names, environmental sounds or mythologies—in particular, a myth which draws parallels between birds, dead souls and women—and the images in the video evoke a similar web of reference.