HANNAH
ELLUL

Produced for Pommel, a broadcast for Nottingham Contemporary. First aired 16 July 2021.

Produced for an exhibition looking at artists working at the intersection of textual, visual, and sonic performance, this video brings together snatches of sound with images from found notebooks and domestic detritus. It marks an early exploration of themes that have shaped the subsequent work, Lenition.

Lenition is a linguistic term for a weakening of certain spoken sounds, from the Latin ‘lenis’, for soft. Ideas of weakness and softness have guided this work. Our induction into language is an induction into social discipline. When language breaks down—as when the body breaks down—the loss of that discipline is understood as weakness and incoherence (and sometimes insubordination). Developing this work has brought these terms into view, refracted in the biographical elements that come through in the source material I use.