list.co.uk/festival Siân Robinson Davies | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
TALKING HEADS
Neil Cooper speaks to artist and comedian Siân Robinson Davies, whose interest in the way people interact has inspired her latest audio work
I t’s good to talk. Just ask Siân Robinson Davies, whose new sound work, Conversations, has opened at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop as part of Edinburgh Art Festival. It features 13 bite- sized dialogues between inanimate objects, intimate body parts and intangible universal constructs. Over almost half an hour’s worth of speedy exchanges, assorted odd couples l irt, rub up against each other or else just try to explain themselves through snippets of philosophical enquiry.
Characters include a Credit Card attempting to explain to a Penis the notion of contactless transactions, an on-heat Lipstick coming on strong with some sexless Breezeblock and last words from a Pillow in conversation with Revenge.
‘I started writing the conversations because I was asked to write textual responses to a couple of artists’ work, both of whom work with objects,’ Robinson Davies explains about the roots of Conversations,
‘and then I just developed them from there. I guess they came about from a general interest I have in the way people interact.’ A stint on the committee of Edinburgh artist-led space Rhubaba was also an inl uence on Robinson Davies’ installation, which forms the i nal part of On an otherwise ordinary evening, a series of ESW exhibitions based around storytelling.
‘I have become interested in how groups make decisions, reading stuff such as Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats,’ Robinson Davies says, referring to the lateral thinking guru’s system for group discussion. ‘Reading about all these ways that people can communicate effectively has just drawn my attention to the way we often communicate really ineffectively, or with differing perspectives or priorities that are never made explicit. So the whole thing is really about how we manage to get along even though we have these weird disjointed conversations all the time.’
4–11 Aug 2016 THE LIST FESTIVAL 105