Mouthnotes

An Cloch Labhrais (The Speaking Stone), is a huge glacial erratic made from conglomerate puddingstone rock. Located in Co. Waterford, it is known as a ‘truth’ telling oracle stone. According to legend, the dramatic crack in the stone occurred after a woman perjured herself in its presence – her untruth causing it to split in two. Mouthnotes reclaims the stone's split, and reimagines it as a mouth from which a multitude of utterances and un/speakable things leak and spill. Through this disorderly form of self-expression, non-conforming vocalisations flow up to her mouth and out through her tongue*. The installation for Pallas plays with the fabric and history of the exhibition site, a former school, simultaneously stuttering and echoing the order of language, numeracy, and structured behaviour. Breaking away from preconfigured expectations and narratives, mouths and voices separate and reunite, unearthing an imagined enunciation**. In the exhibition, these plural erratic agencies emerge through a series of sculptural, textual and audio-visual Mouthnotes. * Carson, Ann. 'The Gender of Sound' in Glass, Irony, and God. New York: New Directions Books, 2005. ** LaBelle, Brandon. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.