Imogen Stidworthy

Imogen Stidworthy’s installations and films are shaped by verbal, non-verbal, even non-vocal forms of voicing through sound, body, spatial and temporal relationships. She works with people whose language is shaped by a powerful experience, developmental or neurological conditions such as aphasia, or cultural practices such as shamanism. Her recent work engages with non-verbal being.

‘What happens to language and sense-making in encounters with unfamiliar or even unknowable forms of voicing? What different forms of relationship and understanding emerge in the spaces between languages? My work grapples with the impossibility of glimpsing language from the outside. It takes the form of films, sound works and multi-part installations involving sound, video, sculptural and technological elements. I engage with these questions through encounters with people whose relationship with language is in some sense radically affected, whether by life experiences, cultural practices (shamanism, ventriloquy), neurological or physical conditions (aphasia, non-verbal autism). My current work engages with relationship between verbal and non-verbal being and involves people who have no practice of language at all.’

Imogen Stidworthy completed her PhD ‘Voicing on the Borders of Language’ at Lund University (SE) in September 2021. In 2018 she was awarded the Special Prize for the inaugural David and Annely Juda Award, and has won and been shortlisted for many awards and prizes.