At this time I was interested in ventriloquism and this is one of a number of performances that build on ideas around displacing my voice.

I made Record while I was studying for a Higher Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London. While there I made use of the sound studio to record myself singing an ‘ooooh’ which I then sampled and modulated over an octave in pitch. The result was a recording of a voice singing a continuous ‘oooh’ which slowly transitioned from very low to high. The recorded sound of my voice was then pressed onto an acetate record.

In the performance of this work I wired up record styli and attached them with medical tape to my fingers and then played my own voice on the record. Attaching the styli to my fingers enabled me to access my voice as a single note or chord. The styli also enabled me to slide across the grooves of the record, scratching its surface, altering, gradually distorting and partially erasing my recorded voice.

The acetate’s were expensive to produce and when I performed this work I would use one side of the disc to rehearse, saving the other for the performance.

The adjacent photos show the surfaces of both sides of a record. The top disc bears the traces of a single performance while the one below was produced during rehearsals.

The black and white photos of this performance, which took place at the Slade School of Fine Art degree show in 1994, were taken by fellow student Sarah Cole. The colour photos are by another slade student, Christina Lamb, and the performance took place at Nosepaint in Vauxhall.

The photographs of the record were taken by Slade photography technician Thomas Jenkins in 2016 — 22 years later.