I work with texts, images, installations, and particularly sound and the voice. The speaking and singing voice has great potential in terms of its sensual and seductive qualities: evoking people, events and meanings, including hidden or forgotten ones.

I like to situate the voice in a ‘fabric’ of sound gleaned from field recordings, often of specific sites. My piece A Milkmaid’s Song, sited in the Dairy at Uppark, includes recordings made outside the dairy of birds singing, a cockerel crowing,
and of traditional butter-making machinery. These then enter into a dialogue with the non-recorded sounds experienced by the listeners when they come to the work. When the visitors come to the Dairy, whisper to one another, walk on the flagstones, more layers of sound come into play.

These layers of sound combine with the recorded sounds, whose source is uncertain, and another meaning is created.

Sound can bring the past into collision with the present. Here I sing a newly composed melody, which supports the traditional words. And the story of the singing dairymaid who married the master of the house is brought together with sounds of Shirley Hill, National Trust employee, demonstrating how to make butter.

As soon as I visited Uppark I knew I wanted to make a work about Mary Ann Bullock singing in the Dairy, and the way in which her voice attracted Sir Harry who had yet to see her. The sound piece works both outside the Dairy – as the sound is directed from a single speaker out of the door, across the fields, enticing visitors to approach – and also inside the Dairy where the hard surfaces and resonant space are like a resonant chamber. The voice is alive, breathing out through flesh. But from what kind of body, one living or dead?