Fabric, voice, wind
In Doyle’s images the wind is the activating agent of the figure. Instigating movement and gesture in the fabric, the air as waves of pushed particles somehow both reveals and obscures the wearer. We know that this is a figure draped in fabric, and as such is the presumed form-giver. However the wind provides animated variance of fold, flap, curve, pleat and so acts as an auxiliary form-giver, quite often at odds with the primary thrust of position or pose. It is perhaps this underlying awareness of two skewed agencies that so unnerves.

This idea of external agent as form-giver appeals to me and I devise a similar strategy by which to consider a voice. I am drawn back to a 1951 recording by Alan Lomax of a keen for a dead child sung by Cití Ní Ghallchóir (keen, from the Gaeilge caoin, to wail). The sorrowful, gently lilting melody is sure but fragile; dipping and surging in strength, with some inflections falling to a softness only barely committed to the magnetic tape’s surface. Here is a disembodied female voice, sequestered from the lived life of the woman, displaced and adrift in time.

I imagine this voice sculpted and broadcast by the wind, by passage of air of raging force. Whipped, stretched taut, loosened again, flickering and tossed in disparate fragments. Using spectral processing I subject the recording to this conceit – isolating particular frequencies, stretching them, contracting them, casting them across the stereo field in various pitches and densities.