Little or No Breeze

A LITTle or no breeze

A little or no breeze, a new collaborative piece, comprises two moving image works (developed with Gary Stewart), and an original soundscape combining both spoken word and music. The work directly references two texts from Hans Sloane’s A Voyage to Jamaica; one in which he charts the weather in Jamaica on a daily basis, and the other in which he records his brutal and nonconsensual medical treatment of Rose, an enslaved woman at the house he is staying, who is suffering from depression. The work engages with Sloane’s casting of himself as an objective observer in his work, rather than a perpetrator of violence. This material is interweaved with a re-imagined Angolan slave song, originally noted down by freed slave and Jamaican musician Mr Baptiste, and fragments of recorded phone call conversations between the artist, Joy Gregory, and the recollections of Jamaicans who emigrated to the UK and their early encounters with the British weather.

Observations

Rose was produced by Joy Gregory and Philip Miller in association with Gary Stewart. Photography production: Joy Gregory; editing: Gary Stewart, Joy Gregory; music and sound design: Philip Miller; sound recording and mixing: Rob Brinkworth at Resonate Studios. Voices: Pauline Edwards, Sister Granville, Dionne Gregory, George Gregory, Joy Gregory, Linius Gregory, Sasha Prince, Wendy Robinson, Gary Stewart.