• Work

JAMES BOWEN

James Bowen is a fully-funded practice-based PhD research student at Loughborough University investigating the human voice as atool for drawing.



By leading my research through this practise, where I explore a series of vocalisation acts through a range of technologies and environments, I ask: how can my voice be used as a tool for drawing? This research question is underpinned by a hypothesis that by investigating my voice as a drawing tool the ambiguity inherent in drawing can be explored through the instability and potential of my voice in its contingent emergence. I argue that the movement of voice is mediated by the materials and technologies through which it vibrates and transduces. These non-graphic traces are pluralised and contingent, and while being effects of the human body in the act of voicing and listening, cannot be reduced to the body alone.



Drawing #1: wooden locker (2019)

4 Channel Audio (Surface Transducer)

Video Documentation


Drawing #5: shipping container (2020)



Drawing #2: transducers on my face

 (2019)




Drawing #7: stylus/window pane (2021)



Drawing #3: overtone singing (2019)

25 Channel Audio 


Sonographic Larynx Scan (2018) 

Audio/Video Projection Documentation


Utterance (2016)

17m30s 18 channel audio

Voice/Sounds of the body recorded with adapted stethoscopes.

Birmingham School of Art