Kelsey Cruz-Martin: Vocal Disarmour

Kelsey Cruz-Martin has been based at Cardiff Metropolitan University for her Freelands Studio Fellowship. For context, she is an artist working across writing, sculpture, sound and print. We share an interest in the voice as material and subject, which I believe is the reason Kelsey invited me to write this text.

The voice, I sometimes think, is that part of the body that is both contained within us and always leaving. The voice, in Kelsey’s research, acts as a carrier of meaning and propellant of change. She considers the contemporary auto-tuned, hyper-popped and auto-pitched voice (think PinkPantheress) as an exponential shift away from vocal authenticity. I get it! Within Kelsey’s taxonomy the voice is a telling keeper of our stories. Within our accents, vocal textures and idiosyncrasies we hear something incommunicable about each other's lives. However, vocal masks – like the auto-tuning that Kelsey steers away from – might also evidence the vulnerability that many in our society cannot afford to reveal: an armour of sorts.

As an artist who is obsessed with the voice, I loved hearing about Kelsey’s research into digitally manipulated vocals, particularly the ways in which they are softened almost to the point of disappearance – into nothing or into mimicry.

Kelsey is a multidisciplinary artist drawn to intensive industrial processes that require attention and immense physical input. Through lifecasting parts of her body into ceramic or metal basins, she creates vessels for her voice to be echoed and therefore multiplied. In this way, the vocal disappearance that Kelsey fears is no more. Material exploration is integral to Kelsey’s work, and her fellowship has facilitated more complex casting processes. Her decision to undertake a fellowship within an art school seems to have been motivated by her deep desire to grapple with materials, to undertake labour intensive processes and generously share all her discoveries with students. In our first meeting, she tells me excitedly about the metallurgical methods she’s learning: lost-wax and ceramic shell investment casting. ​​Kelsey utilises these making processes to imbue her writing with the words gathered within the practice. She teaches me a word that she has gained through these processes – ‘crucible’ – the name of the container in which metals are melted.

In her digital collage entitled A Shell Stood for Zero, Kelsey frames two palm-like forms on the bed of a photocopier. At first glance, these forms look like a small chunk of a skull has been removed, kissed in silver and photographed. The silver forms and the grey surface are at odds with one another, like two unfamiliar cousins. These small forms – that could hold an ear, a small seed or perhaps a shell – recur across a series of digital collages Kelsey has produced during the fellowship. I wonder about the artist’s decision to flatten these forms, and the intensive processes they are resultant of. Looking at the works, I notice how they aren’t as intense as the processes that produced them. They are instead sleek and solitary in their appearance.  

As two artists concerned with the voice, it feels useful to ask of the work, ‘What does it say?’. For some reason, I feel that they are silent. As in, they speak of nothing. This isn’t a value judgement. What I mean by ‘nothing’ is zero: a crucial conceptual and structural tool within Kelsey’s research and work. Over a coffee one afternoon Kelsey introduced me to ‘The Mayan Caper’, a chapter in William Burroughs' 1961 novel, The Soft Machine. In the Mayan numeral system, a seed or shell stood for zero and to me, this is brilliant – poetically drawing our attention to a number we believe signifies nothing and yet is represented by a seed, with all its inherent connotations of potential or becoming something. It is evident from the types of forms within Kelsey’s digital collage works that zero is something: it is a unit, a container, a hole. Within everything there is nothing and within nothing there is everything; or at least the potential of it. Zero. A number when drawn is a shell, envelops and holds and therefore allows us to carry, allows us to be carried and cocoons what is to come.

In one of our wonderfully meandering conversations, Kelsey spoke candidly about wanting her work to avoid a nonchalance that, she believes, is symptomatic of societal overwhelm. In the artist's thinking, this form of quietude primes a collective standard towards repressing the voice. ‘The tall poppy syndrome’ is relevant here: an Australian sentiment that those with success ought to be attacked, which readies a culture for chronic self-deprecation. The rejection of this notion began during Kelsey’s time living in Australia, one of many places she calls home. As an artist-educator, she is open about her struggles with students feeling ‘cringe’ and the ways that the fear of being cringe continues to challenge outward risk-taking within an art school context. Her teaching sounds warm and rigorous, the central pedagogic tenet being to lead with generosity rather than to hide how bright you truly are.

As an experienced technician and educator, the fellowship has offered Kelsey focused mentorship through which to develop her pedagogy, bridging care (doing things properly) and conceptual thinking. Her approaches to teaching – generous and erudite – have been nurtured by her mentor, Sean Edwards, the wider DIY scene and interactions with her students. I would say that art schools need more technicians with niche knowledge, niche words to describe their mysterious processes and plenty of space. Because it hindered the development she had foreseen, it’s worth mentioning that Kelsey had difficulty in accessing the workshop. However, she acknowledges that this made space for several unexpected turns: a co-delivered module on the object, collaboration with a performance collective, and time to read Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva – and consider the concept of the ‘digital twin’ as a parallel self, existing in virtual space, that shapes identity, more sonic experimentation, more deep listening and the exact kind of nonsensical scripting that is mirrored in the text below.