It’s OK
(Audio installation)

It’s okay is an audio installation investigating the relationship between power and reassurance. It uses the aesthetics of public announcements, with connotations of crowds, disasters, and competition, in combination with intimate voice recording, inviting the listener into the tension between the forces and events we cannot control and our attempts to soothe, reassure, mask, cover, and comfort. 

Similar to my installation audio work, You there, this work tests how pared back staging creates the bare minimum conditions needed to explore an idea, leaving maximum space for the meanings of the phrase to expand. To create the audio, I enter a meditative state, allowing all kinds of scenarios, contexts and experiences to enter into my mind, returning to this one response, it’s okay, repeating it until it exhausts itself. I allow the phrase to be a question, a statement, a possibility, both adequate and inadequate. 

The sound invites the listener into similar unbounded, imaginal travel, creating a vacuum into which your own contexts and meanings are drawn. Do you need to be told it’s okay? Are you telling others, or yourself, that it’s okay? The tiny word “it” in the centre constellates a world of fears, burdens, responsibilities, and despair, yet also reaches towards the need for, and hope of, repair.