Olivia Plender

Learning to Speak Sense 2015 is an installation comprising a sound element and a wall-hung canvas on which a set of instructions has been hand-painted. The canvas is suspended using wooden hanging bars which give it the visual appearance of a schoolroom teaching aid. The sound element is twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds long and is played through two speakers positioned either side of the canvas on tripod stands.

Much of Plender’s work explores the symbolic idea of ‘the voice’, in terms of who can claim the right to speak in public, whose voices drive the dominant narratives and which voices are pushed to the periphery. In Learning to Speak Sense this is explored through the artist’s experience of actual voice loss and the consequent voice therapy she underwent when she lost her voice for a year, after an illness in 2013. Plender was struck by the political overtones of some of the phrases she was asked to practice as part of her vocal rehabilitation, such as ‘Many Maids Make Much Noise’ and ‘Militant Miners Means More Money’, many of which she then painted onto the canvas that forms part of the work. Writing about this piece its genesis in her experience of speech therapy, she has explained:

Both [phrases] seem to speak about the power of the collective voice to be heard, demand attention, to ‘make noise’. In the British context, any reference to ‘militant miners’ immediately seems to indicate the miner’s strike of the 1980s, in which the National Union of Mineworkers took on Margaret Thatcher’s government in one of the longest strikes in British history. I became convinced that there is an anonymous author working as a care worker within the hospital system, who distributes their clandestine messages through the voices of individuals who are learning to speak.
(Quoted at http://helicotrema.blauerhase.com/olivia-plender, accessed 26 March 2019.)

Alongside the instructions painted onto the hanging canvas, the soundtrack records Plender working with a vocal coach on these exercises and phrases. Starting with short over-emphasized plosives, building up to longer words and phrases, Plender is encouraged by her coach to ‘feel free to add attitude’ and to ‘enjoy the dipthongs’. She has written of the ‘disciplining aspect of voice therapy’ and its history, saying that:

its origins seem to be found in the training in rhetoric and elocution lessons of the nineteenth century, when men were taught to speak with authority and women in soft ‘pleasing’ voices. Therefore in the sound piece we also do a lot of work where I am trying to learn how to speak with a very deep male voice, which is traditionally what people associate with authoritative speech.
(Quoted at http://helicotrema.blauerhase.com/olivia-plender, accessed 26 March 2019.)

As the soundtrack of the work progresses, the guttural staccato phrases give way to visceral descriptive passages, such as ‘the saliva becomes more and more thick and yellow, and a bitter tasting phlegm keeps coming up into one’s mouth. It’s so nasty that it makes one retch violently as though one were going to be sick.’ These words are taken from an essay written by the British suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) in which she described her experience of being on hunger strike when she was imprisoned for militant actions as part of the early twentieth-century campaign for votes for women. It was published by the East London Federation of the Suffragettes in 1913 in a pamphlet titled ‘The Hunger and Thirst Strike and its Effects’. By invoking Pankhurst’s words in a therapeutic exercise whose nineteenth-century origins were implicated in imposing gender-specific notions of appropriate speech, Plender’s work investigates the social and political aspects of ‘having a voice’.

Further reading
Remco de Blaaij, Gerrie van Noord and Olivia Plender (eds.), Rise Early, Be Industrious, Berlin 2015.

Helen Delaney
March 2019