Based in Manchester, Gemma is a digital storyteller and sound artist whose work focuses on re-imagining the ‘othered’ body and the complex relationship between medicine, disability and ethics. She is particularly interested in using re-hashed “found” sounds and other recycled materials to create impressionistic, disjointed pieces and raw, authentic creative narratives about people, places and things.
Previous work includes ‘The Veins of a Slack Rope Dancer’, ‘Womb with a View’ and ‘Beyond Vocal Norms’ which explored the ‘non-normative voice’ and how it’s sonic reference points redefine selfhood, by both interrupting our understanding of personhood and also presenting the possibility of transcending vocal perfection.
She is also part of Cutter & Nash – a new collaboration with live artist, Gareth Cutter. The collaboration was formed in November 2017 through Metal’s Change Makers project led by creative producer Kate Marsh. Fusing their shared interests in non-normative bodies, voices and queerness, Cutter & Nash create eerie and seductive soundscapes using their voices, synthesisers, DAWs and hacked controllers. Most recently, Cutter & Nash performed as part of ‘The Space In-Between’ at the South Bank Centre.
Twitter: @Gemma_Nash
Facebook: @gemmanashartist
Instagram: @gem_nash_artist
Web: www.gemmanashartist.com
The secret history of the radical female shopper…
Built in 1871, you might think of Barton Arcade as typifying the luxury culture of the nineteenth century, with a carriage entrance and raw iron gates. It is certainly not considered a particularly radical space. However, like many other similar arcades it was once one of the few places women could move freely without being chaperoned by a man.
Historian Erika Diane Rappaport explains that it was during this period that ‘a family’s respectability and social position depended upon the idea that the middle-class wife and daughter remain apart from the market, politics, and public space’. Shopping itself may have been fetishized into women’s greatest pleasure, but for many middle-class housewives in Victorian Britain, shopping was their first taste of real freedom and therefore marked the starting point for their push into public life. Barton Arcade was a place in which, for the first time, women were able to share ideas and meet in public without being accompanied by a man.
Whether it was the Women’s Emergency Corps meetings, Pankhurst’s shopping trips, or female pick-pockets, my piece will explore the secret history of the radical female shopper. Using archived materials, and “found” sounds, I will re-imagine the groups who met here; the conversations that may have taken place and bring to life the stories of the women that occupied this space.
Gemma in Cornbrook Creative’s Cakebread Workshop testing the Sonic Pixels system