FESTIVAL VISUAL ART | Siân Robinson Davies
‘I tried to i nd people around
me whose idiosyncrasies
could bring something out in the characters’
D R A H C R O N E R R A W
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O T O H P
While some of the pieces come from a clearly dei ned physical basis, introducing less tangible
abstractions, such as Flying, Ocean and Revenge, takes the playlets to another level.
‘By having Flying in there, I could ask about whether concepts can take responsibility for actions,’ Robinson Davies says. ‘That relates to whether businesses can take responsibilities for damages. They do i nancially, but it’s complicated when it comes to apologies. Flying is an opportunist who takes credit for the good things and shirks responsibility for the bad. We see that in politics and business all the time. Adding Revenge as a concept allows it to be more slippery than objects can be. Revenge slips in and out of being freedom, and it can do that in our imagination because it doesn’t have a physical form. It’s more difi cult to do with objects, because as soon as you name an object, a Walking Stick, for example, it’s really difi cult for it to become kindling or something else, because the name dei nes its function so clearly.’ For the recording of Conversations, Robinson Davies brought in a variety of performers who bring nuance and personality to each character. ‘In choosing the voices, I tried to i nd the people around me whose idiosyncrasies could bring something out in the characters I have written,’ she says. ‘Take the Feather, for example. The hesitation in the voice is really special, it makes the Feather so believable. I didn’t know it until I heard Timothea read the part that that is how the Feather should sound, but when I heard it, it couldn’t be any other.’
While Conversations gives voice to non-human entities in a way that David Shrigley did in his opera Pass The Spoon, and Glasgow-based performance artist Merlin Nova has explored with a series of monologues by kitchen implements performed on Subcity Radio, Robinson Davies’ work, in part, recalls the It-Narrative, an 18th-century literary vogue that personii ed animals and objects. ‘I was actually reading stuff like David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,’ she says, ‘which is so dark, but absolutely incredible in terms of complex character development through interview / monologue / conversation form.’ In what is effectively a suite of radio plays, one can imagine Conversations i tting in well on online art station Resonance FM. As a sometime stand-up comedian as well, Robinson Davies recognises the work’s potential for performance, and doesn’t rule out further Conversations.
‘I’d like to,’ she says, ‘especially because I feel like I have gained a much greater understanding of how they are being interpreted now they are installed. If I wrote more, there are many things I would improve. But now I need a break from them. I’m training full time to become a computer programmer and I’m working on some prose i ction. The conversations are so short. I love that about them and it’s dei nitely what enabled me to develop them, even through busy periods, but I’m ready for a bit of long form, where I can really knit together complex ideas over a long duration.’
Siân Robinson Davies: Conversations, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 551 4490, until 31 Aug, free.
106 THE LIST FESTIVAL 4–11 Aug 2016