Our voices are not our own is a series of drawings that became costumes for a film made over 2019 and 2020. They were shown at Re-enchanted Matter, APT Gallery, curated by Hot Desque in September, 2020.

The drawings, costumes and film respond to research on aphasia and voice through conversations with neuroscientist Dr Thomas Langford and speech therapist Aislinn O'Reilly.

Searching for what constitutes voice beyond speech and language. Voices are born into the air, only to die instantly if they aren’t recorded or touched through the act of listening. Our brains have developed to predict our voices and their content, the sound passing through bone and fat, muscle and sinew. This is the stapedius reflex: a muscular phenomenon occurring in our middle ears. The tiny stapedius and tensor tympani muscles regulate speech, lowering the volume by 20 decibels and signalling to our brains, that this noise unfurling from lips, is our own. When we play our recorded voices back, we have no reflex, we become foreign to ourselves. This disbelief also occurs after long periods of silence. The voices are ghosts of ourselves, flitting between the unconscious, subconscious and conscious – caught, released, regurgitated. We say that one can find, lose and break a voice. We materialise the immaterial but can’t ever catch up, either behind or ahead, the voice escapes us. Our words are not our own - they visit us - and we can only hold them in - so long.