[ISEA2000] Artist Statement: CATHY LANE – Hidden Lives

Artist Statement

MUSICAL BREAK

Hidden Lives explores ideas of the house as the repository of memories, and of women as the curators of memory and the guardians of hidden histories. All the material for the piece is drawn from a selection of women reading from The Book of Hints and Wrinkles a small piece of social history from the 1930s which describes how women should manage their houses and themselves. The prescribed daily routine timetable is enough to ensure that no woman could ever spend much time outside the house and advice is delivered in such a way as to suggest that women are in fact part of the furnishing of the house to be polished, scrubbed and generally to look clean, welcoming and attractive. Hidden Lives is one of a series of tape works which explore the compositional use of space and gesture as a metaphor for physical and emotional experiences. Hidden Lives is in celebration of all lives lived and forgotten.

The piece was commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique and realised in their studio in Bourges, France.