Artist Statement

During my residency I worked collaboratively with five wonderful people who live or work in Whalley Range, Blackburn. These people kindly volunteered to tell me their stories in the hope that they could provide a counterpoint to some of the negatively charged narratives that pervade the discourse used to describe the different communities that constitute this wonderful town in which we live. Listening to one another can prove to be an extremely powerful way of bringing about a redistributed subjectivity, or as Kassabian writes, it can 'close the gaps that plague us'. This work asks us to listen to one another, as the first step to developing deeper understandings of each other and finding the commonalities that bind us. Rather than focussing on the hearsay that maintains our division, hearing each other's stories can often dispel some of the assumptions that we might have initially had about someone. It allows us the time to really absorb and reflect upon someone's experience and consequently see how it might chime with our own. People are often much more surprising than we give them credit for, and it's frequently, those least heard who have the most to teach us.

I wanted to use the podcast as the chosen medium for my commission for a number of reasons, the first being that this project was designed to respond to a factual documentary program that contained a number of problematic representations, of Blackburn and its people. It seemed fitting to produce a media product with opposing motivations, ethics, working practices, and style, in order to expose how the conventional mechanisations and power relations can be shifted through different modes of practice. Also I wanted to allow my respondent full control over their own representation in order to shine some light on the ideological underpinning of much of the professional media approach to 'truth' in journalism. Over the past few years the podcast has become radio's 'punk' little brother, taking broadcasting traditions and overdubbing them with new ideas, approaches and voices. This seemed entirely in keeping with the spirit of the "Kick Down The Barriers" project, with the freedom of the podcast allowing the producer a level of agency that other media often can't afford.

I also love working with sound as it is our most personal of mediums. Putting on some headphones or putting in some buds, produces a connective and reflective space which is seldom found in the hectic churn of everyday life. It is this lack of time that also can be a detriment to engaged listening and concomitantly can lead to a laziness in our approaches to one another. The 24 hour bombardment of media messages can push us towards convenience over complexity, disregarding the idea that humans in all their beautiful entanglements, require time to be, even in part, understood. I would argue that sound's temporality goes some way to allowing us to do this, to stop, settle in and spend time with someone. Through listening to the sound of the human voice we can develop a really close connection with the person we are listening to, and this can be a moving and rewarding experience, should we find the time to engage with it.

The works that are presented here have been made in collaboration with my respondents, to the best of our ability despite the Covid lockdown restrictions. Essentially everything that you hear has been recorded, suggested or asked for by the interviewee themselves. Although the editing process was done by myself, because I was not able to sit with each person to make the works as I had first envisaged, there is nothing here which has not been given the all clear by them. This was an extremely important aspect of this work because many media products reshape a person's telling of an experience either for narrative benefit or for the benefit of the program maker. Sensationalism sells, but it is not always in the best interest of those telling their story. Media producers exercise a power over the subjects they capture and mediate, and there is a long and continuing history of manipulation, exploitation, misinformation and framing in media products. I wanted this work to stand in the face of those industrial mechanisations and misplaced ethical justifications about the public good. Instead I hope these podcasts serve as true a reflection as possible of the lovely people I met. My interviewees deserve all the credit for these works, because without their brave, open, thoughtful, rich, surprising, complex, nuanced, original, unique stories and voices there would be nothing here, and all the amazing things that they have to teach us about life in Blackburn, past, present and future would still be hidden from our ears, hearts and minds. I hope these works can remind us that everyone's experience is hugely valuable in finding better ways to live, and the more that we can share our stories, the deeper the connections we can make to each other and the town in which we live.