Summoning

SUMMONING (No Words) is a sound temple built of the female voice. 

As audience members move through the space, their bodies activate the sound and the voices emerge, overlap, build, crescendo and recede. The experience changes with every physical interaction.

The installation is theatrical and immersive, recalling the origins of artistic practice in ritual, temple, ceremony and community. 

For SUMMONING (No Words), seven female composer / vocalists each contributed an original vocal composition. Six of the pieces were created responding to simple compositional parameters set out by the project's composer consultant who was in turn responding to Tanya Tagaq's contribution, "Flight" from her album Animism. All of the contributed pieces, including Tanya's, were then edited and programmed into an interactive sound design.

The result is a temple of female voices, some referencing a specific tradition or culture, some working in contemporary and experimental forms.  This soundscape is layered on top of a soundscape of whispered audio which includes poems, invocations, prayers and stories contributed by members of the community, many of them young women.

The temple walls are created from ninety individual fabric panels created by the artists and community members using ancient Shibori indigo dyeing techniques. 

As part of the participatory nature of the work, audience members are invited to create a small ritual bundle to place around the central cauldron as an evocation of healing, remembrance and love. 

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

The project involved many community members who participated in the creation of the whispered audio and also the dyeing, sewing and raising of the temple walls. Much of the whispered audio was contributed by young women. 

Working with fibre is traditionally the work of women, a place and time where we may gather, chat and process our lives. Over the course of five open studios, more than thirty people participated in the process of hand-dyeing ninety Shibori panels using plant-based indigo dye.

An activating ritual, performed before the exhibition opened and created in the tradition of Wiccan practice, set the intention of the project to increase acknowledgment of violence against women, foster healing and stir empowerment.

SUMMONING (No Words)' premiere exhibition at Oxygen Art Center in Nelson, BC (2017), saw over 650 audience members come through and experience the work.

" Overwhelmingly beautiful.  This was such a surprise. At a loss for words."

"Very powerful. Like standing in a dream."