Hush Hush Cecilia (2014)

Andrea Patrick Byrne
Finalist

Hush Hush Cecilia ~ Miniature Violin case / bandages / dressing plasters / velvet / Mp3 player / mini speaker. Audio 2.28" (looped) - manipulated extracts from The Andrews Sisters "The Shrine Of St Cecilia" (1942) and a violin rendition of Paganini's 21st Caprice.
St. Cecilia is the musician's muse and is often depicted with a violin. "Hush Hush Cecilia" is based on the World War II song " The Shrine of St CecIlia" made popular by The Andrews Sisters in 1942. Nurses religiously played the song to injured servicemen in hospitals to ease their burdens, some of whom would not be seeing home again. Using small extracts from The Andrews Sisters with Hush Hush Cecilia there is an attempt to reconfigure the popular song (by placing it alongside Paganini's 21st Caprice) to a vertical hymnal reading, casting the singing sisters as choristers. A portable speaker is placed within the violin case hidden amid the velvet to imitate an intimate choral elegy.

Artist Statement

Andrea Patrick Byrne

Artist working in the arena of female identity with interests in the female voice whether muted, jubilant or ventriloquistic through hinderance. The core concerns of my work are the fragility of hope and desire (with the impingement of time on those desires) within the female psyche. Clothing and household objects are predominant features in the sound installations, valueless curios attempting to express a void, resurrecting the visible to describe the invisible These objects extracted from their own contextual time often reveal an uncomfortable and sometimes sinister air. The dialogue within all the work concentrates on life events in which our emotional histories and identities are created. There is an attempt to articulate that which we carry with us everyday.

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