Corps Sonore (2025)
Sand, Jesmonite, fibreglass matting, twine, sound
Whispers on the wind pine, they call out
Tendrils ebb at the surface, lapping against the hull
The underbelly ticks and groans, brushed awake by verdant fingers
They reach—
But brushed limbs recoil
Distant drones reverberate through this body
What are they saying? What do they want?
Voices litter the bed, you want to draw up the tide and tuck yourself into its gentle rock
The desire to succumb lures you
Purgatory persuades you
Lowering yourself into her caress you become soluble, melding with the choral
You are dragged deep into the diaphragm, past layers of sediment
Molten, flowing past wailing adieus and into the deep where whales keep
It takes time, but you recognise souls of old
Joining them, the current takes you on an eternal voyage
Tresses (2025)
Graphite on paper
Featuring sound-emitting sculptures and graphite drawings, this body of work explores themes pertaining to the sea – female vocalisation, mythology, animal and human migration, and loss.
In this exhibition Clément ventures beyond the boundaries of the physical body to explore the complexity of the female voice. Historically fraught with contradiction, it has been heard as both shrill and seductive, authoritative and nurturing—an "object at once
of desire and fear".[1] In literature, opera and mythology, figures such as the Siren, the madwoman or the prostitute embody a voice whose unruly power disrupts social order—and this disturbance is often quelled through their demise. [2] While creatures like sirens were said to bring death with their song, women have comforted the mourning and honoured the deceased through song. Clément draws on traditional styles of lamentation from keening to Albanian iso-polyphony. Keening, a type of wailing has been performed since the 12th century in Ireland and Scotland. Here, the voice becomes a conduit of remembrance and emotional truth.
Lives lost at sea are honoured in this work, specifically those in the English Channel, which is the geographical space between
the artist’s British and French nationalities. As a passage of personal, social and geo-political tension it symbolises hope, trepidation, opportunity and tragedy. The cast metallic life buoys that signify lifesaving capabilities are made unusable, they are marooned iron lungs. These sculptures emit an uncanny chorus of Siren song, keening, and whale drones—blurring the line between speech, breath and music.
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Ladina Clément’s Corps Sonore invites audiences into a sensory space shaped by memory, mythology, and migration—where the boundaries between land and sea, body and voice, past and present intertwine.
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[1] Margaret Thatcher adapted her voice during her career, dropping it “sixty hertz” between the sixties and eighties.
Tallon, T. (2019) ‘A Century of “Shrill”: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices’, The New Yorker, 3 September. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century-of-shrill-how-bias-in-technology-has-hurt-womens-voices (Accessed: 17 May 2025).
Dunn, L. and Jones, N. (1994) in Embodied voices: representing female vocality in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p 3
[2] Ibid, p 7
This work was kindly supported by:
