Artist Roisin Iona

Careful Talk: Some words crossed out, some words underlined

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

Careful Talk is a multidisciplinary project that continues my work harnessing text, poetry, and moving image as tools for working with the insufficiency of language. The outcomes will be: Visual: –Group shows: ‘In Various Stages of Ruins’ at Lappeenranta Taidemuseo, and ‘their room washed with hot light’ in Turku –Post-production on my film ‘I Spit on Your Genre’ for a solo exhibition –New project ‘A Single Voice in an Empty Space’ Written: –Poetry mentorship with The Poetry School –Facilitating an online workshop of queer poets –Publish dual-language (Fin/Eng) poetry pamphlet I have worked with the insufficiency of language through text installations and sculptures, monologues for film, poetry and singing. I see Careful Talk both as a methodology and an umbrella term under which all my work with language sits. It nods to love and care, as much as to censorship and speechlessness. If language has the power to shape and define experience, then shouldn't we be careful with our words? I want to further grasp the diverse ways that text and the voice can be used within visual art, and develop a new project about the voice in and of itself. There’s a certain fluency that people tend to have when hearing/receiving the voice, especially in singing. Barthes wrote of the ‘grain’ of the voice as the trace of the body in the ‘ephemeral’ aural performance. It is a material quality that is experienced in the body of the listener. Much can be inferred from this grain, not only signifiers of ‘who’ the singer is (age, gender) but also hesitancy, affect, fatigue. A universe in the smallest of inflections, full of ways of conveying without words. In what ways does the voice grant an immediacy of access that other mediums may not? What could a sung vocal in art mean and do?