Stolen Things

7.1 channel sound installation, 12 mins, 2019.

A work commissioned for a historic courthouse space, focussing on the ‘voice’ of 14 year old Ann Lupton (played by Neive Zenner) – a defendant accused of shoplifting in 1853 – the voices of her two co-defendants, and the disruptive shouting of the courtroom public gallery. Ann speaks and sings her daydreams amidst a musical collision between shiny pop melodies and rowdy crowd chants (like AG Cook clashed with Men’s Choir Shouters of Finland). Her hymn singing, shoplifting spirit is contrived out of the stolen fragments of this work’s numerous sources (which include a Taylor Swift chord progression, a newspaper court report, a Jean Genet novel, the childhood memories of local people and a Victorian hymn), and Ann seems all too aware of herself as a construct summoned into our world through these ‘lying words’. As if in revenge for this realisation, she celebrates the idea of badness – and contemporary pop phrasings – as revolt and liberation, and her story ends in a disorderly evocation of some liberatory mischief involving a malfunctioning bellows organ. Thanks to Moira Smith, Kath Beeken, Neive Zenner, Amelia Andrews and Highside Singers. Commissioned by Ripon Museums Trust with support from Arts and Heritage.

A stereo remixed version of the work Stolen Things (The Creeping Things Remix), is released as a single on Owd Scrat Records: https://owdscratrecords.bandcamp.com/album/stolen-things-the-creeping-t…