A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970 – organised by NOVEL
Helen Cammock
The Sound of Words
14-19 March 2019
Closing Event: Tuesday 19 March 2019, 5 – 7pm
Sir John Madejski Art Gallery
Reading Museum
Blagrave Street
Reading RG1 1QH
Opening hours Tuesdayy to Saturday 10am – 4pm
Reading International is pleased to present The Sound of Words, an exhibition by Helen Cammock. The display will feature a recent acquisition by the Reading Foundation for Art entitled Shouting in Whispers, a video work complemented by a series of text-based prints. On the closing day of the exhibition, a group of works produced from a workshop by Cammock, in collaboration with participants from the Reading area will be introduced. These works will be reproduced as a series of posters at multiple public spaces across Reading town centre.
The existing work Shouting in Whispers consists of a visual essay that collages multiple histories across time and place, encompassing video footage, images, and sound that chronicle the protests in South Africa under Apartheid, the Palestinian struggle, Greenham Common, the Brixton Riots, and Shirley Chisholm – the first black female U.S Democratic presidential candidate. The accompanying text-based prints utilise and repurpose language adopted from the various excerpts in conjunction with words taken from songs, prose, poetry, and conversations with the artist that bring to the fore hidden or unseen histories.
The workshop will seek to address the diverse interpretations of what community means and what people understand by it today. It will ask – what do we understand by it; what is our stake in it, why our contributions to it can often vary, and why sometimes our individual and community voice can go unheard or unrecognised.
The Sound of Words by Helen Cammock is the final episode of NOVEL’s year-long publishing and curatorial project  A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970, it has featured contributions by Renee Green, Studio for Propositional Cinema with Hampus Lindwall, Patricia L. Boyd, and Steven Warwick. The episodes will be compiled and re-presented as a publication in Summer/Autumn 2019.
Helen Cammock and NOVEL would like to thank Reading International, Elaine Blake and all the staff at Reading Museum, the Reading Foundation for Art, Mary Genis at CultureMix, Jeff Jones and the Barbados and Friends Association of Reading (BAFA) and the Reading Foundation for Art.