Clee Claire Lee

Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, Isle of North Uist, Scotland

ARTS THERAPIES CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION 2022 Sameness and Disturbance: An exploration of Identity and Place.

CONFERENCE 2nd AND 3rd SEPTEMBER

EXHIBITION: Aonachd Sameness Disturbance Triomh a Chéile

1ST SEPTEMBER – 29th OCTOBER

Identity – 4/10 definitions

1. The state or fact of remaining the same one or ones, as under varying aspects or conditions.

2. Condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is; the qualities, beliefs, etc, that distinguish or identify a person or thing.

3. The state or fact of being the same one as described.

4. The sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time and sometimes disturbed in mental illnesses, as schizophrenia.

Place – 6/29 definitions

1. A particular portion of space, whether of definite or indefinite extent. 2. Space in general: time and place

3. Any part or spot in a body or surface

4. Position, situation, or circumstances:

5. A region or area

6. A mental or emotional state: I’m not in a good place right now.

At Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, in partnership with the University of the Highlands and Islands’ Institute of Innovation and Research, Rural Health and Wellbeing, the first arts therapies conference to be held in the Outer Hebrides will explore the pertinent themes of identity and place in relation to human experience, as well as how continuity of self might be maintained despite disturbance to a person’s sense of self, identity and place in the world.

Over two days, in person and online, delegates will have a chance to hear four different presentations interpreting this theme from leading Scottish and UK-based arts therapists and researchers.

SPEAKERS

Catriona MacInnes Alastair Robertson Dr Chris Wood

Dr Ania Zubala

Art Psychotherapist, Researcher, Lecturer.

Music Therapist, Musician

Art Psychotherapist, Researcher, Lecturer and Political Activist Arts Therapies Researcher, Lecturer

If you attend in person, there will be the opportunity to explore further the theme through the arts in two groups facilitated by experienced arts therapists who will safely guide you in the process.

WORKSHOP FACILITATORS

Catriona MacInnes Ingrid Bell

Bridget Grant Alastair Robertson

Art Psychotherapist, Researcher, Lecturer. Art Psychotherapist, Artist.

Art Psychotherapist, Lecturer

Music Therapist, Musician

The Exhibition which opens the evening before the Conference includes three artists whose artwork has an existing relationship to Identity and Place.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Ingrid Bell; Clee Claire Lee; Gina MacDonald.

Photo credit: Preys B (Installation shot), 2022 by Clee Claire Lee; Photograph by Peter Martin, Shared Programme

In resilient voice! Preys B, a muted chorus pulses with life

Gillian Whiteley

www.bricolagekitchen.com

‘What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?’

Audre Lorde 1

For a brief moment, the initial encounter with Clee Claire Lee’s solo exhibition at Exchange Place Studios, an intricate installation of over a hundred modular structures suspended precariously from the ceiling, is a benign restorative experience. Visitors are invited to step carefully through a gently wafting forest of delicately crafted objects, arrayed like a mass of whispery lace bonnets that might have been woven from spiders’ webs. The neutral hues and organic materials evoke a ‘natural’ aesthetic that is both comforting and reassuring in these anxious times. The intense labour that has gone into the making of these objects is worthy of close attention and perhaps quiet contemplation is enough in its own right. But there is something slightly sinister and disturbing here too. What else is going on?

Resonating capacities long gone, some old wooden piano key hammers and an assortment of other randomly chosen objects find themselves trapped inside bits of basketwork. A red plastic wire bleeds onto the floor. Objects are snared in fastidiously fabricated wire cages. Closer observation shows that each of the dangling hundred or so spiky structures is meticulously constructed to resemble a human throat. From each gullet, a tiny wooden bead of a mouth spews out a profusion of wire, cartoon-style, like a mini-volcanic eruption of noise. This dis-abled chorus of objects is accompanied by an intermittent audio track: an old metal boiler casing mounted with decoy speakers conceals a throbbing mash-up of human voices muttering ‘Let me know when you want releasing…’ 2 Every so often, tucked away in a corner, a looped animation is projected onto the wall; a fleshy mouth bares its teeth, barking like an angry dog.

Over the last two years, Covid has made us all mute, dumbfounding us into submission, muzzling mouths, muffling voices. But there are more powerful historical and contemporary resonances at play here. If these muted objects are trying to speak, what are they trying to say? With its ironic nod to the rebellious handmaids of Gilead 3, Clee Claire Lee’s Preys B can be experienced at many levels and is open to a range of interpretations. But it is important to get beyond the obvious associations, as it also resonates powerfully with gendered histories of silencing and muteness that traverse place and time, harking backwards and forward to the current day.

Sustainable materials, collaborative processes

Before addressing the silencing and noisy resonances of the work, the materials and processes involved in the artist’s practice deserve some prior attention. Although this is a solo exhibition, much of Lee’s work emerges from a lengthy gestation of working through ideas collectively with other practitioners: visual artists, dancers and film-makers 4. That said, the modular structures in Preys B were created through an intense laborious process which was solitary and involved many hours of close detailed work. Largely using a twining technique, rather than weaving, sometimes in combination with raffia, the web-like fabrications, forming Forty days, one mile, a hundred voices, were primarily made from a mile-long length of ‘paper string’ originally sourced from Japan. Shifu is the name given to the making of thread or string from washi, a Japanese handmade paper traditionally made from kozo (mulberry). For over 1,500 years, and with only a few refinements, traditional papermaking methods produced strong paper. This paper was spun into thread and the thread was then woven into shifu cloth used to make durable everyday garments. With the development of synthetic fibres, this ancient craft had almost disappeared during the first half of the 20th century but with the demand for sustainable materials and a resurgence of interest in artisanship, there has been a contemporary revival of the art of shifu 5. The paper string used in Lee’s installation is made from recycled paper. Another sustainable aspect of the installation, and indeed of the artist’s practice more generally, is the re-use of materials. Frequently, Lee’s installations re-deploy salvaged objects and dismantled things that she had previously fabricated, sometimes the result of collaborations with other artists. In this way, items such as a cherished chair castor, or the tiny galvanised mesh wire cage that was previously part of a collaborative piece in Material Voice’s Matter out of Place 6, form an ongoing conversation in which objects speak to each other.

Gossip and ‘bridling’ the ‘scold’

Notably, ‘speech acts’ 7, and the political implications of ‘voice’ and voicelessness, are central to Lee’s work and the exploration of these discourses is particularly at play in Preys B. Although there are many ways to approach notions of voice, there are references within the exhibition to gendered and misogynistic histories and contexts. These were underlined by Lee’s one-off durational performance in the exhibition space, in which the artist sat speechless and motionless for her entire exhibition opening event, her face covered and head encased in a specially constructed mask. Whilst there were resonances with the multisensory participatory art objects worn in performances by the Brazilian Lygia Clark in the Sixties 8, Lee’s mask more specifically referenced the ‘scold’s bridle’ or ‘brank’, known for its use in 16th and 17th century Europe. As no information about the nature of the performance was provided prior to the open evening, visitors reacted in a range of different ways. As evening drew on, dark shadows fell across the walls from the installation, creating a tense atmosphere of anticipation. For some, the event was a powerfully moving one; others felt uneasy, commenting on the strange disturbing nature of the performance and found it difficult to read. Many were astonished by the endurance, composure and stillness demonstrated by Lee, who herself remarked on how she felt a strong sense of both absence and presence throughout her self-imposed ‘bridling’ 9.

The first recorded use of the ‘scold’s bridle’ was in Scotland in 1567 10. The barbarous contraption consisted of bands of iron with a protrusion of metal attached to the inner part of the iron hoop. The bridle was locked into place, preventing the wearer’s speech. The spiked ‘bit’ held down the tongue and reached to the back of the throat, causing retching or vomiting or even breaking the wearer’s jaw as most often the ‘gossip’ was tugged through the streets on a lead whilst being whipped.

This painful form of public humiliation was lawfully imposed to prevent women meeting together to talk. Through the 15th century, women were increasingly chastised as quarrelsome and aggressive. By the 16th century, women’s status and social position had deteriorated to the extent that women, largely older and poor or members of dissenting religious movements 11, were frequently attacked as ‘scolds’, primarily a feminised unlawful offence 12. Accusations of voracious sexuality and witchcraft frequently went in tandem 13. Indeed, Silvia Federici argues that the suppression of women and women’s sexuality through witch-hunts facilitated and constructed a capitalist patriarchal order that has continued into the present 14. Remarkably, the crime of being a ‘scold’ was not dropped from the statute books in Britain until 1967 15.

Rebellious silence, radical rudeness, WWNBS!

In the 1970s, the figure of the witch underwent a decisive revival and a resurgence of interest. Indeed, with individuals such as Starhawk and groups such as W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), the witch became a symbol of feminist and gay struggles in Europe and the US. For some, the witch had become a figure of sexual empowerment: the appropriation and recuperation of the bridled ‘gossip’ had been initiated 16.

Violence against women has certainly not diminished, with the systematic violation of women’s rights taking place every day across the world. Alongside this, there has been a ‘speaking back’. Silence itself can be a rebellious tool of protest as demonstrated by Saudi women who, in 2017, filmed themselves silently walking the streets at night without male companions as part of their struggle for the right to drive. Elsewhere, spurred on by the #MeToo movement, women have reclaimed noisiness and are challenging power through ‘radical rudeness’ 17. Recent cases, such as Sarah Everard’s murder and the heavy-handed police response to the mass vigil in March 2021, have renewed campaigns against violence against women.

In resilient voice, Preys B offers an opportunity to think about speaking out in Release your voice. This de-installation event, at the exhibition space 11am-2pm on Tuesday 29th March invites participants to do just that, to find the words, whatever they might be. So, what are the words you do not yet have? 18

Gillian Whiteley

www.bricolagekitchen.com

March 2022

The exhibition and associated projects are supported by Yorkshire Artspace, a-n The Artists Information Company and Arts Council England.

1 From Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action‘, first published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978).

2 The audio track is a manipulation of the voices of Lee and Shirley Harris, Gill Crow and Gill Alderson from a 2018 collaborative project, Syn-Aesthetic.

3 ‘Praise be!’ was one of the standard greetings amongst the Gilead residents in Margaret Atwood’s feminist futuristic novel The Handmaid’s Tale, originally published 1985 and celebrated more recently in the serialised version made for television, 2017-2021.

4 Preys B builds on Preys, an installation that formed part of a group show at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2020. It has involved working on a voice recording with audio resumed from a 2018 collaborative project, Syn-Aesthetic. Gerry Turvey held a dance workshop within the installation and Rachel Smith collaged images from this workshop to create a slideshow which was projected onto the wall at the open evening event on 17th March. Creative filming of the exhibition is in collaboration with Shirley Harris.

5 See Hiroko Karuno, Shifu: A Traditional Paper Textile of Japan, 2016 available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/977 and Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, Kamiko, Washi and Takuhon-shi: Making paper clothing in Japan, 2020 https://www.emkp.org/kamiko-washi-and-takuhon-shi-making-paper-clothing-in-japan/

6 Clee Claire Lee is part of the artists’ collective Material Voice. Material Voice’s Matter Out of Place exhibition was held at Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield, 18 June to 10 July 2021.

7 Ideas relating to ’speech acts’, the active, performative nature of utterance, are associated with the philosopher J.L Austin, but have since been developed and critiqued by others, notably Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari.

8 See Cornelia Butler/Luis Pérez-Oramas, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, MOMA New York, 2014. One of her multisensory masks can be seen here, Adrian Anagnost, Presence, Silence, Intimacy, Duration: Lygia Clark’s Relational Objects, 2017

9 Anecdotal feedback from audience members was collated after the event and was provided by the artist by email 21 March 2022.

10 The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic claims the earliest reference to a bridle worn by a woman may have been made in the 1380s by Geoffrey Chaucer. Serious scholarship cites various references and dates but commonly cites 1567, as does Silvia Federici in Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, 2018, PM Press, Oakland.

11 See https://www.lancastercastle.com/history-heritage/further-articles/the-scolds-bridle/

12 See Chapter 5 in Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, 2018.

13 Federici, p. 38.

14 Although it was primarily women who were accused of witchcraft and were victims of the bridle, there were also cases of men suffering the same fate.

15 See https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/hold-yer-tongue

16 See Note 10 and Anna Colin (ed) The Witching Hour, Le Quartier centre d’art contemporain, 2014, exhibition catalogue and Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre Capitalist Sorcery, Breaking the Spell, on the reclamation of witchcraft.

17 The concept of ‘radical rudeness’ recently re-emerged as a tactic in Uganda. Also see this commentary on a recent feminist art exhibition in Kyrgyzstan https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/fateful-feminnale-an-insiders-view-of-a-controversial-feminist-art-exhibition-in-kyrgyzstan/

18 See news notices at www.cleeclairelee.com/news-1

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