Kate Pickering
The Hermit and The Crowd
Installation
#28 - 7 March 2019
Audio installation in the dark, for one person at a time.
Text: Kate Pickering
Vocals: Reece Miller, Murat Adash, Barbara Pitzianti, Kate Pickering
Duration: 28 minutes
The Hermit and The Crowd, an excerpt:
You sit alone in this room, cocooned in darkness. The door is shut, blinds are drawn over the Georgian sashes, the lights are out. Old air hangs, speckled with dust motes. It circulates a little with each intake and outtake of your breath, which spirals into the ambient atmosphere.
You are alone (I)
You (We)
You (Them)
You (He)
You (Her)
Here
Here you are
Hermit (airtight; impervious to external influence; recluse)
Hermit (relating to or characterized by subjects that are mysterious or abstruse)
Imagine looking down from above onto the top of your head. Picture your body here, seated alone in this room. Now you see that you are not alone, instead, a small crowd of other bodies is gathering around you. These bodies are different to your body, an array of sizes, ages and shades. The bodies are multiplying. The walls begin to recede. Now there aren’t just tens of bodies, but hundreds. They continue to assemble, now the crowd is in its thousands, now tens of thousands. Now, look up from the centre of this immense crowd. You can see your tiny face peering down on yourself from somewhere high up above. Now you look down upon yourself in the centre of a mottled pattern of many bodies, your face a small dot looking up. Now you look up, now you look down.
Kate Pickering is a London based artist, writer and PhD researcher in the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. She investigates belief as embodied narrative through research into Evangelical megachurches, focusing on how a body is dis/oriented within the megachurch through material, visual and fabulatory conditions. This research is extended into writing and staging site based readings of fiction. Pickering has exhibited nationally (Tenderpixel, TAP, Bloc Projects, Bury Art Gallery, ICA) and internationally (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand; Espacio Enter Canarias Festival, Spain; Four Boxes, Denmark; Bangalore Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, India; Moon Event Space, China). Her writing has been published in Dual Mirage, Misery Connoisseur, Yellow Pages (Copy Press), EROS journal and online journal K[]NESH Space. Pickering will be participating in: Corroding the Now: Poetry + Science/SF (University of Surrey; April 2019), Futures of The Real (Goldsmiths; June 2019) and Imagining the Apocalypse (The Courtauld; October 2019). kate-pickering.com
