"I created Our Voice after working with a group of LGBTQIA+ students from Greenfield Community College.  I was surprised how their life experiences were so similar to LGBTQIA+ people of my generation.  How our coming out stories were similar, our feelings about being part of a community were often the same, and how hard it was to describe what it really means to feel safe in our tribe.

 

The temporary structures in Our Voice are an attempt to translate ephemeral feelings into material objects.  All the objects have been created from the words of our community.

 

The show is deliberately monochrome, For people in many parts of the country, and in many countries in the world LGBTQIA+ life isn’t all about rainbows.  In the UK many businesses dress themselves in rainbow colours during the Pride month of July, but those same companies do nothing to stand with LGBTQIA+ people when they do business in Qatar, Nigeria or Russia.

 

Just before I started the project I had been working with my friend Alice Thwaite collecting the stories and memories of older lesbians, gay men, bi and trans people.  Alice and I wanted to capture the stories of activism that have led us to our more liberated ideas about gender and sexuality.  We also wanted to make sure that young LGBTQIA+ people had a sense of their own history, and the history of the community that they were joining as they found their own sexual and gender identities.

 

As I started to listen to, and then recording, the young people as we made things in our craft sessions, I realised there was a sense in which we all shared this idea that we built a community of support out of our words.

 

As LGBTQIA+ people we don’t have big institutions to represent us, or designated buildings where we can meet.  Events like Pride are important.  In spite of their temporary nature, these festivals make us feel safe.  For a few hours we are the majority, we don’t have to think twice about showing affection to the people we love, we are not stared at by passers by if we hold hands.  For a few hours we are all safe to be our whole selves.

 

I have never been able to explain to people outside our community how it feels to be in it.  That was another thing that came through in all the interviews, this sense of connection to other LGBTQIA+ people, people who we hardly know feel part of our lives.

 

When I listened to the recordings of the older lesbians and gay men in particular, I was reminded how hard the struggle for freedom has been, and that our struggle is rarely recorded in museums or history books.  Many of the important historic objects like our hand-made banners our screen printed t-shirts, our handwritten leaflets have been lost.  But it is these objects that made our community.  In Our Voice I have brought these historic objects to life.

 

I’m not sure what Our Voice is, or where in history it is located.  It is a show that time travels, both through the testimonies of the LGBTQIA+ people who feature in the soundscape, and in the banners that recall campaigns of times gone by and the present day.​"