Mary Lemley - My Life in Hackney Part Two : Injury, Death, Epiphany (a work in development)

About

My Life in Hackney Part Two will be the final element of Mary Lemley’s ongoing archival project My Life in Hackney which began in 1999. Where Lemley began mapping her home, herself, and ideas of place through photographing each item in her home for My Life in Hackney Part One. This final iteration will take stories from Lemley’s life, ‘My Life’, and sounds from the place where she lives in Hackney.
The project is intended to consist of two identical works, two aspects which shift between notions of here and there, past and present, and text and sound, between an outdoor place and to an indoor space and between the static text and the dynamic sound.

For Hundred Years Gallery, Mary Lemley will be showing the work in development. Using the gallery like a studio to explore the indoor aspect of My Life in Hackney Part Two. Where a rich texture of everyday sounds of Hackney will emerge behind a text grounded in the geological processes of the lands that bore the personal events that are then woven together – events on Injury, Death, and Epiphany.
From behind the text, the sounds of the everyday will emerge from recordings made a few days earlier from three windows in Lemley’s flat on the York Row Estate. There is an energy of push and pull, between listening and reading, and amidst moments of seemingly disconnected elements, there will be serendipitous instances of alignment of sound and word. Here the sound serves as a whispering ordinary, intermittently repeating, heightening or deepening, without discernible or consistent rhythm the broken melody of the poetic text.

Mary Lemley is an artist and writer working in text, installation, and performance.
Originally from New York where she made work for The Kitchen, the New Museum, Collaborative Projects (The Times Square Show). After moving to London her work in Britain has included in 1992 the highly acclaimed These Fragments We have Shored Against our Ruins, marking the Thames’ tides and former tributaries.  1994 commission by Artangel with Graeme Miller on Listening Ground, Lost Acres, commissioned by Artangel. In 2001 she embarked on her ongoing archival project in and around her home My Life in Hackney. My Life in Hackney Part One: Half of Everything – was exhibited at the Laure Genillard Gallery in 2006 and Kettles Yard Inside Out/Upside down 2009.

Flying backward into some future, from the sounding of three printed texts recalling stories of Death, Injury and Epiphany entangled in their geologic history. Concealed speakers resound the rich texture of this life in Hackney now. Giving space to a push and a pull between listening and reading. Words erode and re-synthesize into a glissando of new minerality with fresh sonorous traces of memory. Oscillating sound shapes all from end to end, from an entrance to an arrival: then connect back in time. A constant deep pulse of an amplified geophone with no place or space as it diffuses a sub-bass like the downward pull of sediment pressure. Narrating a whispering ordinary in the weathering of everyday sounds.
Precarious. Constant. Resilient. Words are just air.