Airlock

Briony Galligan

Gallery 3
Opening 06.11.19 6-8pm
Artist Talks 28.11.19 6-7pm

Airlock is a new exhibition work. A chorus of hand-built ceramic megaphones are strapped in as appendages for invisible bodies, ready and waiting to start to speak. An audio-work, MOUTH,  loops between their revolving fleshy inside and the living room hospital foyer outside. 

This work refigures Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’ where a performer is physically strapped to theatre staging with a tiny hole for their mouth, ears blocked so that they can speak at the pace of thought. Initially staged in 1972, ‘Not I’ launched onto UK television screens in 1973 with Billie Whitelaw’s ‘oversexed jelly-fish’ mouth moving ‘like a missile’ to play a character called MOUTH. 

There is no inside or outside to the mouth, I consider it as a Möbius strip and form of threshold. I think about the words we speak masquerading as animal or fish, dressed up so our bodies don’t reject them.

This project has been support by Australia Council Career Development Fund.

Sound mentor: Lucreccia Quintanilla

Steel fabrication: Simone Tops.

Photos courtesy Christian Capurro.