This is Rebecca’s bio.
An artist based in London, Rebecca Lennon works across media to produce large-scale multi-channel sound and video installations, musical releases, performances, texts and visual scores. Using rhythm and musicality within video and sound editing to disturb narrative flow, Rebecca evokes a psychological and neurodivergent relationship to language, words, loops and noise – meditating on memory and its voices, while spatialising layers of sound, vibrations and visceral texts that fragment and repeat. Recent video and texts focus on entanglements of ownership, forms of housing (and their collapse), embodiment, porosity and questions of what constitutes a voice. Rebecca graduated from the Slade School of Art London MFA in 2010, and is a visiting lecturer at universities such as Arts University Bournemouth and Royal College of Art, London. Upcoming/recent exhibitions include: Cafe Oto, London, 2022, Galeria Duarte Sequiera, Braga, Portugal, 2021, Kaunas Film Festival, Lithuania, 2020 and Whitstable Biennial, 2018 with solo shows at Southwark Park Galleries, London 2021, Primary, Nottingham, 2020, Almanac, Turin, Italy, 2019 and Matts Gallery, London, 2018. Rebecca recently featured in ‘On Care, an anthology of artists writing’, published by MA Bibliotheque, 2020, BBC Late Junction 2019/2020 and on a collection of artist interpretations of scores by writer Salomé Voegelin, released on vinyl in 2022. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Goldsmiths across departments of Fine Art and Music.
DUMB 2019
I find this work not that engaging. I think art is subjective so I’m not saying I don’t completely enjoy it. I get her piece to an extent, it speaks about the lesser needs of the working-class and minorities. But I find this sort of performance to be clichè. She repeats the statement and shouts dumb after. That the statement she makes is DUMB. I also find that from reading her bio she is more of a live performer and her installations and multi-channel work might have enhanced this piece more. I’m listening in stereo currently so I’m not as immersed as she might have wanted to with her ideas of this piece.
Liquid i
This piece has the use of the voice, and most definitely would have also been multi-channel. You see mosquitos flying and the buzz of the wings emulated by I assume Rebecca. The majority of her work isn’t described on her website simply shown and perhaps this is also intentional. As stated previously her work is mostly live and has multi-channel speakers in the room to enhance what’s being shown. And as much as I like abstract work I don’t enjoy this sort of work without a context. I think the visuals and the audio by themselves are interesting and not terrible but overall it’s not something I would go out of my way to watch.
I’m interested to ask her about her live installation work. The thought process behind it. Is it site-specific like the other visiting practitioners or simply how to adapt your ideas to the space?
Post Lecture Reflection
Rebbeca begins by speaking about her work Mouths. She performed behind a red screen and this is because she likes to obscure herself in performances to produce distance. For Rebbeca rehearsal is form. She likes to think of her work as rehearsals, sketches or taking different forms. She wanted to create a relationship between her writing and her performance and she used contact mics on her throat to portray her anger at being silenced.
There are many themes in her work, boundaries, landlords and the tenant appears in this work of different kinds of ownership and containment. Her mouth is covered and instead, you hear another mouth.
She was working with layering voices in stereo. She tested her idea of six speaker poly performance and found it incredible to work with. Speakers were arranged in a circle while viewers stayed in the middle, the vocal dissociation given by the speaker set up created in an immersive experience.
Rebbeca work is very interesting and multi-layered. I find her ideas quite fascinating as they truly are beyond my own understanding. The fine art aspect is something I’ve always been pushed away from due to exterior factors affecting me. Such as social and political settings involved with the higher fine art society. But after re-listening I do think there is always something to take from someone’s work. I think her motivation and choice of doing what she lives is inspiring in itself.