“Hannah Wallis is an artist, curator and researcher based in the Midlands. Marked by an attention to the boundaries between making, performance, locality, curating and disability rights, Hannah’s practice exists at the intersection of these disciplines; concerned with how visual and performative knowledge production can inform and be informed by collectivisation, collaboration and long-term research cycles.
Collaborating under the moniker of Dyad Creative with artist Théodora Lecrinier since 2014, and supported by organisations including a-n, East Street Arts, National Centre for Writing, Kettle’s Yard, and Arts Council England, Hannah has led residency programmes and learning projects, developed interactive commissions and curatorial research, as well as managing several temporary artist-led spaces.
Currently working as curator-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre, as part of a programme to support the career development of D/deaf and Disabled Curators, in partnership with DASH, Midlands Art Centre and MIMA, Hannah also provided curatorial support within the wider Wysing programme before joining the curatorial team at Nottingham Contemporary as Assistant Curator.
Committed to the long-term application of accessibility practices within the arts, Hannah has worked with Aural Diversity, Deafroots and National Gallery, London. Hannah currently works as artist mentor and support aide for DASH members.”
Hannah talked about her interest in Sound and how it’s a complicated relationship. . Wallis was born with hearing, but due to complications from illness, became deaf. She could hear for the first 18 months, which is a very formative period, so Hannah can speak, but relies on lip reading alongside cochlear implants to listen to others. This means that she has transitioned through various states of hearing, experiencing hearing aids before needing cochlear implants. She referred to this as ‘Hearing mechanically’ and that it “Opened up the space to how I understand just how sound shapes us”. With these experiences, Wallis takes her responsibility as a curator seriously. We talked about ‘captioning’ and how artists should take greater consideration of captioning before completing a work, so we can aim to approximate and “…. translate sound for those who don’t hear it in a ‘mainstream way”.
I was interested in the term ‘Captioning’ and mistook it for an aim towards more multi-sensory works. Which whilst Wallis encouraged multi-sensory aspects to Sound Art it was not necessarily the main concern when it came to captioning, more just taking more time to accurately describe sound and not seeing the process of describing ones work as demystifying but something that could accurately discern that experience for disabled people. Text and Image offer another way into the sound, as people who enter a space don’t enter on equal terms. Examples of good/bad captioning in film; “eerie music” or “music playing” in text on the screen. One specifies the mood of the music, the other just tells us there if some music is playing. Wallis also spoke about translation and how good captioning would work like a very considered translation of a novel. Notably, translation always has a bias, as the translator is a conduit for something that isn’t naturally their own words. Captioning another person’s work can be done well but like translation is a sensitive form of representation, that is why Wallis encouraged us to practice a ‘caption-conscious ecology’… “These things need to be integrated into practice daily and not added at the end when you might not have much budget left and resource left”, thinking about how these works will be translated to disabled audience members from the start of the practice, means its less of an afterthought and more inclusive.
Wallis helped curate an exhibition with Ain Bailey and Wilf Speller called Version.
This piece was drawing from Ain Bailey’s exploration of her cultural identity. Sculptures and the vibration of bass add extra sensory elements to this installation increasing its inclusivity.
Christine Sun Kim, whose sound art directly references and uses captioning as a means to explore her relationship to Sound as a non-hearing person.
Here is Christine Sun Kim introducing her works from ‘The World is Sound’. This sound art maps out a type of deep listening. Using classical music’s notation for dynamics as means to describe complex types of neurological behaviour and global warming. Kim explains how surprisingly descriptions captioning in film influenced this work. This work really opens up what sound art can be.
In a previous post I spoke about how Lightning Field by Walter De Maria could be arguably a piece of Sound Art. The ‘Land Art’ piece is designed to capture Lightning, which regardless of whether the weather… permits such a sound event, we are aware of this sound as consequential of the structure and therefore we are thinking of the sound when it is not physically occurring. Through Sun Kim’s work I am starting to make this connection (prior to reflecting on De Maria). How I am learning the discipline of Sound Art, through a musical background as a gateway into practising Art and not Music. To recognise Sound Art as a branch within Art and not a separate entity we can start to have more fun with the visualisation and vibration of sound. Through text or associative sound producing objects, we subconsciously hear these sounding objects abstract from experiencing a physical sound. This is itself is a type of deep listening that is potentially more inclusive. These abstract sounds could be entirely culturally constructed too, so whilst I might hear an associated sound in my head, and Wallis might, these are still not a completely shared experience. This challenge of art that can be fully accessible to everyone further’s the point of Captioning.
When I think of images that naturally evoke a sound without the need for sounding, I might think of Ocean, Forest. I generally think of environments which are very complex sounds that someone without that learned experience of hearing could understand. Is acousmatic listening useful in how we explain/caption these sounds which we can’t help but think of through word association (our learned experience from an ableist-set culture)?
In a previous Visiting Practitioner Lecture, Andrew Pierre Hart spoke about how painting a rock, or a bicycle makes him hear an associated sound when speaking about the deep ancestral history of the sound of rock’s smashing together. “Don’t think of an elephant” can be applied to this type of thinking.
Hannah Wallis when speaking about how she hears and drawing off these layers of hearing differently throughout her life. She has a certain amount of learned experience of sound through periods of hearing and periods of not hearing.”Whilst I might not hear in a natural way I have knowledge around that”. This is different for every deaf person. Some people born deaf won’t be able to contextualise sound in the same way as her. She spoke about how chords and tonality are things deaf people may struggle to define due to no learned experience of these concepts. Wallis says that learned about sound from interacting with its absence to gain a unique perspective. How do we define Deep Listening in light of these incidents? Captioning our Deep Listening experiences might help deaf people sculpt a clearer sense of what is around them, or remind them of sensations imbedded in the subconscious. But also, might teach us to think about this ‘space around sound’ that Wallis describes.
Drawing off my own experience with sensitivity to sound and tinnitus, I have an interesting relationship to silence. For a long time I hated silence and tried to avoid it. Therapy practices often involve a kind of westernised meditation, in which I am encouraged to sit in silence with myself, sit in silence with the damage. I couldn’t care less about silence until I convinced myself I couldn’t hear it anymore, but silence is subjective, so sound must be subjective too.
Hannah Wallis documented a collection of research for Wysing Broadcast during the beginning of the pandemic. https://wysingbroadcasts.art/explore/hannah-wallis. This open research shows the books and sources of interest Wallis was uncovering, and is a very transparent look at independent study, with book recommendations and Sound Art recommendations all linked so the visitor can follow along with whatever might pick their interest. I have personally found this very helpful for some recommendations for books on the subjects of chronic pain, living with disability, aural diversities and sound theory. So many quality resources to unpack.
Reading List:
Beyond Unwanted Sound: Marie Thompson
Sonic Agency: Brandon Labelle
The Human Voice: Anne Karpf
The Body Keeps The Score: Bessel Van Der Kolk
The Delayed Present: Wolfgang Ernst
Matters Of Care:
We spoke about practising a ‘caption-conscious ecology’ with Sound Art and how for best translation, thinking about the caption process should exist from the beginning of the performance. Whether that’s accompanying text or image, or any other sensory forms of art. The biggest takeaway for me is that whilst I operate under the helpful term of Sound Art (as a person with no Fine Art experience, but lots of music experience) there is something intimidating to me about visual forms of art. But I find Sound Art works can often look quite unattractive without a visual or sensory element – this lack of visual attention potentially cuts of sensory avenues that could include more visitors. Annea Lockwood drowning a piano for example, without the striking image of that drowned piano the sound could be underwhelming. Gestures by Yan Jun showcases a dichotomy between action and sound. The flash from the cameras tells us when sound events are occurring. An exciting and freeing concept to me is a silent sound object that produces the thought of a sound still being a sound? Yet, not all sound works can exist in a multi-sensory domain, which is where captioning plays a vital role in helping those who can’t (or at variable levels) experience sound and why we should all think harder on how we can translate these feelings and concepts of sound to someone without the same learned experience. This lecture put into perspective the myriad of relationships to sound that I have taken for granted. Understanding tonality, harmony, frequency and by proxy vibration. Speech, silence, distance, positionality and probably countless more things that don’t come to mind right now.
I hope to continue this line of research and relate more to my own experiences of experiencing sound.
“You can listen with your body, not necessarily with hearing”.
“An absence of something can shape you as much as the presence of something”
Deconstructing how sound operates in society. Sound is something that can be captioned.
How do we approach the accessibility of past works?