Olivia Plender, Learning to Speak Sense, 2015/2017, Sound installation with painted canvas and wood

For this piece, Olivia Plender works with a voice coach to improvise around some of the voice exercises that she practiced, after she lost the ability to speak due to an illness in 2013. Many of the words, phrases and sentences that Plender was given as exercises by the hospital, appear to have some kind of hidden political message. However, the work explores the disciplining aspect of voice therapy, as its origins seem to be found in the training in rhetoric and elocution lessons of the nineteenth century, when men were taught to speak with authority and women in soft pleasing voices. Plender mixes these with words taken from a visceral essay by the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, where Pankhurst describes the physical effects of being on hunger strike, when she was in prison for militant actions as part of the early twentieth century campaign for votes for women.