LINES OF COMMUNICATION
REVIEW BY Andrea Holland, Lecturer, Writer and Poet, Norfolk
‘Other men have tried to explain the phenomenon physically.’ Read out of context this line from The Rainbow Passage, a text used by Speech and Language Therapists, may complement or be seen to illuminate the actions and representations Caroline Wright employs to explore the physical creation of sound, reminding us of the physical act of verbal communication. The precise moment of articulation is evoked through several works, including short films: 700 Words, The Rainbow Passage, Slip of the Tongue, a performance: Voice Human Action, framed works: 34 minutes I (dialogue) and 34 minutes II (dialogue) as well as hand blown glass shapes suggestive of the larynx and audio work of the sound of breathing (Untitled (breathing).

The elementary act of speech is given corporeity in each of the works; at its most graphic in the intimate (internal) vision of vocal folds– moist, fleshy – the place where words are born resembling the passage of human birth. This endoscopic film of wet, warm vocal folds in action (Wright is speaking The Rainbow Passage text) contrasts/ dialogues with another piece, Untitled (breathing); cool, transparent, open glass shapes, suspended by invisible nylon – windpipes with open apertures at both ends, so air can circulate through. The performance, Voice Human Action, in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, is different again, singers and actionists imposing oral and written ‘conversations’ centred around The Rainbow Passage text. The Lady Chapel acts as a voice box and the position of the performers is similar to a lozenge (implicitly, the vocal cords/folds) suggesting a physical correspondence with the fan vaulting above, structurally resembling the pale roof of a mouth; the performers moving like a tongue in macrocosmic articulation of the concept Wright explores here, and in all the works in this exhibition.

The Bacon-esque long exposure shots of speaking mouths, as well as the short film 700 Words remind us how facial expression informs the linguistic; words are nothing without warm mouths. The blurring and distortion of mouths in the photographs, the (deliberate) exaggeration of the 700 words expressed by various speakers in the film both serve to illustrate how the tapestry of language is maintained in extremis, and paradoxically what may be lost without the operation of physical structures (vocal folds, tongue, jaw etc) and particular attributes which afford expression to anger, joy, fear, laughter, comfort – all the bewildering and magnificent emotions spoken words go some way to represent. But what happens when the physical parts which co-ordinate to make speech don’t work the way they should? In 34 minutes I (dialogue) and 34 minutes II (dialogue), Wright has juxtaposed at opposite ends of the gallery a framed transcript of one half of a conversation between the artist and a Speech Therapy patient who communicates only through the written word. Writing a conversation is unnatural; a distortion of the ‘accepted timing and pace of everyday conversation’, as the artist indicates, and can usually only offer minimal information in the exchange. By directing the viewer to travel between the framed transcripts in order to comprehend the dialogue, Wright illustrates the precarious nature of verbal communication and what is lost in the translation to text. A compression of language, a reduction of meaning…the stilted and conscious act of communication on paper is different from the spontaneity of chitchat, telling tales, retort and repartee.

All Wright’s work consciously explores representations of speech, and in this exhibition the graphic realisation of, and attention to, the physical dimensions of the act of speaking allow the viewer a distillation of this complex process, one we utilise constantly, unconsciously, with each other. Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel famously wrote, ‘The silence of God is God’, for what words can describe the unspeakable; it seems God is silent at times but humans never. We are leaky creatures, learning to speak out of babble, articulating an exponential vocabulary that both joins and separates us from others. Without language we are a rout, and no different from other animals. Here the artist reminds us how fragile our position, indeed, our identity is – how two thin folds of flesh perform a dance in the throat and give voice to who we are. We may at times lament the limits of language, but in Wright’s work we are face to face with its formation, the rhythms of the spoken word recorded, broken up, represented, performed, re-formed, made beautiful. ‘Other men have tried to explain the phenomenon physically’. Language is a rainbow between people. Wright presents a conversation between art and viewer which may be silent (we receive, not reciprocate) yet each work articulates a corporeal aesthetics of the precarious yet necessary hidden actions that make words happen into the world. ‘Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation’.