Summoning: Walk into the light

KPU professor examines women’s voices in latest installment.

“Beams of light.” That’s how creative writing professor Nicola Harwood describes her latest art installment, currently scheduled to open a year from now, in August 2016. Entitled Summoning, the idea for the installation began as a conversation with the project’s event producer, friend and previous collaborator of Harwood’s, Rosemary Georgeson, about the lack of safety for aboriginal women.

“It just stuck in my head and it started to transform from a theatre show into a installation. I began to see it and hear it not with human bodies in a space, but with sound,” says Harwood.

An audio-based installation that will also utilize a fog machine and motion sensors, “Summoning” will consist of five-minute compositions from eight female Canadian singers. These compositions will be paired with crowd-sourced audio from around the world which are currently being accepted anonymously through the project’s website: Summoning.ca.

“The theme of the exhibition is about violence against women, so the idea is summoning women’s voices in an invocation of peace, prayer, power or however people would like to interpret it,” explains Harwood.

As an interdisciplinary artist who’s worked primarily as a theatre artist and playwright, Harwood’s exploration of such subject matter stems from the early 1980s and ‘90s, where she first began to look at different forms of violence against women. “It’s like the more things change, the more the stay the same. I wish I didn’t feel so compelled to have to do this still but . . . it just keeps coming back, and I guess it has been one of my central concerns.”

Harwood’s work has always been grounded in community engagement, to “speak to the people, in a sense, rather than just to artists. It’s always been important to me that my work communicates with people who are not necessarily going to walk into an art gallery or walk into a theatre, people who don’t necessarily live an arts life. I would still like them to be able to see, feel and hear my work.”

For Harwood, the exhibition will be a response to certain gender-based tragedies, in order to “somehow create healing.” The goal is that people’s experiences “will never be the same twice, it will always be subject to the movement in the space,” leading them up to a light source sculpture, envisioned by Harwood, triggering the audio to an ever-changing climax.

As of now, outreach is being conducted within classes and all over the world in order to build an international vocal presence by asking women to contribute short pieces of spoken audio online, either “a poem, prayer or story.” While exclusively for women, Harwood notes that “if people identify as a woman then that’s fine too . . . transgender individuals are completely welcome. I’m not going to turn away men’s voices but they may not get programmed into the installation.”

The inclusivity of people for whom this is an issue that “creates tension in them” is important for Harwood, as she hopes to acknowledge where all the pieces of audio, used in the installment or not, originated from. She will accomplish this by creating an interactive map on the site in order to connect women across continents. At this stage, the project is still raising money and awareness, with the ultimate intention of premiering at the Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson B.C., then touring across other venues in downtown Vancouver, and quite possibly Kwantlen in the enclosed gallery of the Surrey campus, if space becomes available.

Summoning itself is just a single part within a three-part installation series known as the Temple of Our Madness, all about women, animals and girls. “The underlying theme is that the planet, biosphere, species and women are all often subjected to the same dominance, violence and mistreatment. These things create a strong tension inside of me and that’s what comes out of my art. I want to create a response to that . . . to provide a counterbalance or fight a counter narrative,” says Harwood.

This is where the summoning of women’s voices originates from—as a source of power and beauty that is in opposition to stories about victimization. The creation of such a technically complex installation necessitates a team of vocalists, programmers and composers, including KPU student and project assistant Mikayla Fawcett. Fawcett was one of the early advocates for the installation, moving the project from the purely idea stage to the current reality of development.

An emerging artist and writer herself, for Fawcett this is not only a great learning experience but also a passion project she is excited to be a part of. Her excitement stems, in part, from the discovery that the project would have an inherently inclusive to examining women’s voices.

“I feel like that’s the core aspect of proper feminism. It has to include transwomen and has to include the interests of women of color and of all castes,” says Fawcett. “I hope to record something with my voice as well, and have been trying to reach out to all my friends and get them involved.”

“I really would like people to be affected,” Harwood explains of her project. “That they might have an opportunity to grieve or just feel safe, if that’s what they need.”