Conversations. Siân Robinson Davies

About

In this series of improbable encounters, a penis and a credit card discuss the nature of contactless payments; an argument ensues between flight and a feather as to where the responsibility for decisions lie; and grass and an apple try to work out their metaphorical status.

Drawing on the 18th century literary tradition of It Narratives, inanimate objects are attributed speech to examine their properties through characterisation and personification. Conversations explores how an object’s function, materiality and environment might determine its beliefs and behaviour. Through their interactions, the objects attempt to understand one another, sometimes learning, other times failing.

Siân has worked with a range of artists, writers and comedians to perform the voices for the recordings, focusing on accent, intonation and pace to draw out the characters of these inanimate things. The voices of safety equipment and celestial bodies, kitchen implements and reference books, cosmetics and building materials, fade in and out of the gallery from an otherworldly soundscape.

Conversations is the third in the series of exhibitions, On an otherwise ordinary evening curated by Peter Amoore. Thinking through artist’s practice, the series brings together two artists and one critic engaged with the telling of stories, in attentive homages to other artists – their lives and their works – and in the imagining of improbable encounters between objects.

In April, artist and filmmaker Holly Antrum introduced the artist Jennifer Pike through the lens of her considered camera and in June working with designers Maeve Redmond and Sophie Dyer, poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein relocated the lives and works of artists to the spaces of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.