Paloma Proudfoot, A festival of ugly sounds – The Approach, East London, 8th November 2025 – Back to The Approach, opening night, a Saturday night, a Saturday night’s alright for fighting, although this art crowd that attend openings here (and yes, there are different art crowds, distinct tribes) do seem to just impolitely like standing in the way and imposing their self importance in a passively aggressive manner when it really is obvious that you’re trying to see what they’re standing in front off. Get out of the damn way, go chat in the bar downstairs or at Least in the middle of the room and not directly in front of the art some of us have come to see. Not sure why I persist in Approach openings, I really should have learned my lesson by now, don’t go to opening nights in this space (we been doing so for so long now, there’s years and years of Approach coverage on these pages as well as via previous formats of Organ) I should know not try to politely ask this particular art crowd if they could maybe just move a couple of inches to the side, really should have just taken a bite, it is so tempting to just take a bite a times…        

“My earliest memory is of biting my older brother in a rage when my request for orange squash wasn’t being understood. Maybe he was wilfully pretending not to understand what I meant by pointing at the juice bottle – too high for me to reach – hoping I’d give up and stop pestering him. I can still conjure the bruise coloured tooth marks in my brother’s freckly forearm after my frustrated outburst, and his incongruous laughter – not even my harshest bite could get to him. I had glue ear, which meant I could emit sounds but not yet in the form of coherent language, and I could hear only so far as if being underwater. With only a few words, I spoke mainly through abstract gargles, screams and bites, until grommets cleared my ear canals and speech therapy honed my wayward sounds into polite words and diction.

Human sound is slippery, travelling and mutating from private interior to public exterior. Starting in the rehearsal room of the inner monologue to the gathered breath funnelled through vocal folds that form the sounds emitted into the air as words. This finely tuned process can so easily be thrown out of sync. A warped or uncontrolled sound, misunderstood, feared, derided. I was late to speak, but like most children quickly learned the association between language and control, and the gendered nuances of sound. Crying, screaming, whispered gossip and giggling are girl sounds. To be taken seriously these tones and timbres of voice that push the extremes of joy and pain should be kept to a minimum”.  – Paloma Proudfoot

What to make of the bite of Paloma Proudfoot’s art, of this solo show, indeed, does it bite? Is it supposed to bite? Is it even trying to bite? Does it need to? Stupid questions? 

“The Approach is pleased to present A festival of ugly sounds, a solo exhibition of new ceramic, bronze, and textile works by Paloma Proudfoot. The exhibition investigates the gendered histories and cultural associations of vocal utterances, examining how sound shapes identity, emotion, and communication”.

Oh what to make of it all? it isn’t about liking or not liking, it surely isn’t that obvious, it isn’t that anything is quiet or muted, or for that matter loud and demanding. I don’t know if I know what this is saying to the viewer, the looker, the listener? Does it, the art itself, say that much or does it needs the words, the show statement, the piece of paper to go with it? Has the cat got your tongue? Did curiosity really kill the cat, what did standing here do?  The piece of paper is certainly interesting.    

“Proudfoot’s works consider how, throughout the centuries, women’s sounds have been regarded as obscene and thus have sought to be controlled, curtailed and muted. As Anne Carson writes, ‘putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.” and that is all well and good but is what is (mostly) on the walls (and occasionally) on the plinths saying any of that? 

The work itself intrigues, those three dimensional wall hangings, that (very) strange glass of wine, the almost folkiness of some of it at times, those flowers. I can’t say I like it, but then am I supposed to? Is art always to be liked, and yes, you might say who cares if you don’t like it, certainly no one asked (although, actually, we are quite often asked, Organ has now somehow survived in one form or another for almost forty years, well just a couple of weeks off 39 years since two rather skint art students thought it might be a good idea to put out a one-off  publication. It does appear that all these years later some people are interested in what we might think). I don’t know what to think of this Paloma Proudfoot exhibition? I don’t really like what I see, I surely don’t need to like what I see to like an exhibition – yes, I could have said appreciate, or respect or many other things rather than like, I chose to say “I surely don’t need to like what I see to like an exhibition”. It does feel strong, I like that, it feels powerful, considered, oh who cares about what I do or don’t like.          

“In Gossip, anatomical mechanisms of voice are enlarged and turned outwards. Vocal folds, trachea and diaphragm protrude sound as branches, each growth emerging from the speaking figures visualising how voice travels and transmogrifies, describing and collapsing the distance between bodies and environment. Whilst the mechanics of sound production are implied and exaggerated, the work itself remains muted. Like a silent or dubbed film falling out of sync, the viewer sees the animations of sound without actually hearing it. In this space we fill in the gaps – overlaying our own sounds produced from memory and imagination onto the image.

Feminine utterances come in different forms. Women have often been attributed the role of the divine vessel, a messenger through which omens are delivered and communicated, in the form of body premonitions as well as speech and song. In the ancient world there was ‘Ololyga’ – a ritual shriek particular to females, either of intense pleasure or pain. Festivals were held to allow for these guttural emotional outcries – albeit not within city limits lest these vocal expressions contaminate the ears or space of men.

In Irish and Scottish traditions, dating as far back as the 7th century, the practice of keening was popular, whereby ritualistic mourners would wail and sing laments at funerals on behalf of grieving families. These women became conduits for collective grief, ventriloquising the suppressed inner cry of the grieving assembly. In Keener the vocalisation of mourning is reimagined as a lily – often considered a symbol of death – its bud emerging from disembodied lips, each petal a tongue forming a floral trumpet.

Women continue to be encouraged into roles that position them as conduits rather than producers of sound. In early technologies, women were targeted for jobs as telephone switchboard operators known as ‘speech weavers’ and typists, and today feminised voices are reproduced as AI assistants such as Siri and Alexa, mere robotic channels of information rather than authors”

Proudfoot’s work Three Fates Unknown draws on the classical trio Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who spin, measure and cut the thread of life respectively. A line threads the figures together, morphing from artery to thread to headphone wire, joined together into a single feedback loop. Death lies below but keeps busy listening, winding the threads of life into a cat’s cradle. Speech and handicraft share a background as spaces traditionally associated with women’s work, whether laundry rooms or switchboard offices, these environments harboured safety for conversation between women otherwise denied or fiercely policed in patriarchal society.

In A festival of ugly sounds, Proudfoot reclaims the female voice – once cast as unruly or monstrous – instead amplifying it into a site of resistance, communion and power. The works expose how sound is never neutral, but always entangled in histories of authority, gender and control”

The gender of sound? The gender of art? I like what Paloma Proudfoot’s saying, what she’s thinking, what she’s doing. I like the questions she’s asking of the viewer, the looker, the listener, oh who cares what I like.Paloma Proudfoot’s solo exhibition just opened at East London’s Approach gallery, a beautifully peaceful space to engage with art at anytime other than n the opening night…  (sw)

The Approach is found on the first floor above the pub, 47 Approach Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9LY, Access to the gallery via The Approach Tavern pub, there’s a brown door at the end of the left side of the bar. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 12–6pm or by appointment. The Paloma proudfoot exhibition goes on until December 20th 2025.

Previous coverage of things at The Approach

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