‘Voicing the Voiceless: Tracing Speech and Silence Across History, Literature and Contemporary Art’
‘Voicing the Voiceless’ uses the 1662 confessions of Isobel Gowdie as an impetus to contemplate wider uses and abuses of human speech, its ephemeral and uncanny qualities, and its relation to expressions of grief, trauma and destruction in an embodied individual sense and in terms of wider cultural theory and philosophy. In this lecture, a multitude of different voices will be considered, as will the spaces they create between sound, language, music and testimony.
Gowdie’s third confession is re-voiced in Dahlstrom’s film ‘Oh Ill Thief’, and the complex act of re-voicing a text once allegedly spoken is also interrogated, as are the acts of lamenting, confessing and recanting, explored using historical accounts, contemporary artworks and philosophy. Gowdie’s words utilise the constraints of Christian doctrine and pagan oral tradition to express a troubling will; in 2025, they can also be viewed through lenses of nihilism, feminism and post-humanism. Ultimately, this talk asks: Beyond our own bodies and our own selves, what other voices do we speak with?
‘Hare Hare god send thee care (Devil speed thee, go thou with me)’, pen, pencil, oil pastel and charcoal on paper (2023)
‘Oh Ill Thief’
single channel film, 9 minutes 53 seconds (2019 - 2025)
‘Oh Ill Thief’ is a short film that forms part of a multimedia visual art and research project, built around the words of Scottish Highland woman Isobel Gowdie.
Gowdie, a tenant farmer’s wife from Auldearn, Nairnshire, gave a series of confessions in 1662; the document containing her alleged words was discovered 200 years later. This film takes these words, this voice, and combines the narrative with the locations of the supposed acts themselves, across four hundred years of distance. ‘Oh Ill Thief’ depicts the destructive power of the voice; cultural devastation, loss and survival.
Gowdie, a tenant farmer’s wife from Auldearn, Nairnshire, gave a series of confessions in 1662; the document containing her alleged words was discovered 200 years later. This film takes these words, this voice, and combines the narrative with the locations of the supposed acts themselves, across four hundred years of distance. ‘Oh Ill Thief’ depicts the destructive power of the voice; cultural devastation, loss and survival.
Bio
Rosie Dahlstrom, she/her, is an artist and writer born in Glasgow, now based between Glasgow and London. She trained in Painting & Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2014, before relocating to London to study MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) from 2018 to 2020. Her practice considers queer, female retellings of archetypal monsters and creatures existing between male/female, alive/dead, animal/human binaries. The cast of characters variously depicted in film, painting or installation includes cave-dwellers, dragons, vampires and sea creatures; underpinning all their stories is the contrast of the living body with the shared imaginary world of cultural inheritance.
@comfort_me_with_apples
www.rosiedahlstrom.com
Rosie Dahlstrom, she/her, is an artist and writer born in Glasgow, now based between Glasgow and London. She trained in Painting & Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2014, before relocating to London to study MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) from 2018 to 2020. Her practice considers queer, female retellings of archetypal monsters and creatures existing between male/female, alive/dead, animal/human binaries. The cast of characters variously depicted in film, painting or installation includes cave-dwellers, dragons, vampires and sea creatures; underpinning all their stories is the contrast of the living body with the shared imaginary world of cultural inheritance.
@comfort_me_with_apples
www.rosiedahlstrom.com