The heads in my voice

Roland Barthes wants the creative act to be discernible within the medium of an artwork’s making, across genres. He wants a reader to activate their own writerly capacity in the analysis of a text. He wants a recorded voice to hold the muscularity of its resonance. In his study of art music, “The Grain of the Voice,” he writes that “[t]he ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” The grain thus far exceeds virtuosity or talent or beauty, in vocal terms, moving beyond streamlined representation to implicitly showcase the mouth, the tongue, the throat, and the whole mechanism of sound’s anatomical production instead.

In The heads in my voice, Marlene Steyn presents a visual translation of the voice’s granularity and grit. With this new series of portraits, the ephemerality or invisibility of voice is rendered concrete, so that the topography of the human face and the three-dimensionality of the head as form animate, illustrate, and invigorate preconceptions of vocal range. The head is the resonant chamber of sonic production. The face faces forward to incarnate what’s happening inside. Here this physicality of voice is particularly significant considering that Steyn’s body of work is visually mute. All lips are closed. In these portraits, the mouths are not reverberating with song, are not soaring forth into aria. If they are considering self-expression, their monologues are internal and their voices are contained within the material infrastructures of the human skull. Even in the spectacular painting, the breadth between mouths, where a slim, blue line of breath connects the embedded series of lips, the glimmer of expression echoes in silence.

Within Steyn’s larger oeuvre one might note that the faces here are older than they were before, more worn with time and aging, more material and three-dimensional. Some of the artworks, painted on wooden board, embolden faces with objects. soothe swayer wounds the neck with an emergent piece of pink quartz flowering ominously from the vocal cords. falling a wake contours the eyes with dark and light by roughly carving and scarring the face to land in an interpretative space somewhere between manicured and battered. In various works, little ceramic shapes have been nailed into painted surfaces. If not outrightly violent, then, at the very least, the tangibility of these voices inhabited by heads, materialized as heads, shapeshifting in buzzing tension with heads, imagine the labour of their own production.

True to form, Steyn favours a pun or reversal. Instead of using the more familiar phrase, “voices in my head,” The heads in my voice, at its most audacious, prompts the viewer to reappraise portraiture as a genre. It startles the viewer into questions about visuality versus sound, surface versus space, and inside versus out. Steyn’s titular about-face invites the viewer into the acoustic cavity of the inner head, to reconsider the musculature of the voice, and to be immersed in the psychological surround sound of the face performing its construction through time, place, and lived experience.