Othy Willis
Francis Barrett - Cry
Francis Barrett’s work is a dark room with a small light directed at the entrance, there are multiple speakers playing the voice of Joanna Fabro’s voice.
Walking into the room is met with an initial bewilderment; you walk forward into the darkness blinded by the light - the screams of Fabro's voice move around you in a way that you almost forget them.
Walking through it until you reach the darkness.
There slowly your eyes texture the room, the longer you sit as your eyes adjust you slowly see the room clear - you are at this point inducted into the space.
The simplicity of the work is revealed here, you now witness the same initial bewilderment of others that walk through, the work is untangled before you, the innards of the work revealed.
Here perhaps you move on, it's perhaps enough to be inducted into a space.
But you now have a kind of entitlement you have been let in…you have the opportunity to sing, scream and make noise.
The outside cannot hear you as it cannot hear sages screams and moans. So if you're bold you scream…you become the artist for yourself emanating sound from your throat you activate the space with your voice and suddenly the infrastructure is yours and you hold the space as it holds you.
This inducting of viewers moves beyond a kind of superficial participation because of the entitlement needed to embody yourself in the space, you have to become vulnerable to the space, knowing that you're possibly operating outside of the structures that the artist desires you to be in.
Othy’s work centers the porous body, give the objects that pass through their hands autonomy, capacity to effect. With this playful embodied practice they seek to nourish in ways that take power away from extractive systems.