Hangry (4th Trimester) was an object-specific audio track, made to animate the Roman marble statue of Terpichore, currently situated at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Terpichore is the muse of dance, and now missing her arms and harp. Through a pulsating soundtrack, including the unanswered cries of a baby, Hangry makes audible the imagined anger of this faceless body of a woman, identifiable, but now without her defining object of production, with no mouth to cry, eat, speak or scream.
The narrative is based on an interview I did with my maternal aunt, who is heard recollecting her extremely traumatic caesarean-section birth in the 1970’s, during which she was awake under anaesthetic but unable to speak or be heard by medical staff. Her interview is spliced with a fictional police interview.
The work was made while I was on Maternity Leave and during my own “fourth trimester”, a time of isolation, heightened anxiety and complex emotions for many (m)others. The work was shown at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, where it was played through speakers in the middle of a circle of outward-facing chairs, in a similar set-up to a seminar given at University of Oxford. It was also shown at Tramway, Glasgow, in an evening dedicated to parenthood.