Gabrielle Hoad
The walls tremble, the furniture stamps its feet | 2025- | Moving image and sculptural work in progress
The walls tremble takes as its starting point the female mediums of the late 19th and early 20th century. During séances, mediums would demonstrate the presence of other-worldly forces by the tilting of tables and the animation of other domestic objects. Some of this activity was taken to be genuine; on other occasions it proved to be cleverly engineered conjuring tricks.
By finding ways to initiate and record the visible and audible movement of objects we think of as inert or static, the work acknowledges their agency. These misbehaving objects could be seen as symbolic of the way Victorian certainties were being disrupted by rapid developments in science and technology, as well as by massive social change.
*Title is drawn from an account of a séance by a French journalist in 1857, sourced via an article 'The medium on the stage' by Simone Natale (2011)