Early notes, Shamica Ruddock

Shamica Ruddock was invited in autumn 2020 a co-curator on a project centred around oral histories and the Scottish African diaspora, at the time nameless and ungrounded, through conversations spanning a year and sharing of notes Library of Frequencies project was curated.

We imagined the project would be research-driven with invited participants to take part in curated activities to generate a new body of research.

The creative sessions were framed around the varied points of departure within this text:

sonic space of enquiry…
slow
and self-determined
held in various sites
kitchens walking back and forth pushed through letterboxes
building
a library of
… alternative knowledges
sites of Exchange…
a space that is
transformative
healing
ignite
gather
oral traditions
past and future memories
how are we being called to respond?

More info

Shamica Ruddock is a research-based practitioner working often between sound, text and moving image. Their current practice considers the ways in which Black diasporas are engaged and explored through sound. Meditating on Sound culture as semiotics, Shamica is particularly interested in how sound becomes a form of narrativising often with its own unified system of signifiers. Considering ideas around traces, echoes, abstraction and returns; the Hauntological qualities of Jamaican Dub provide for the artist both an underlying methodology shaping processes of making whilst also standing in as apt descriptors of Black being in the wake of slavery.

A 2020 Jerwood Bursary recipient, Shamica has also begun researching Afro-Caribbean puppetry and oral folk storytelling traditions. They are a member of Black Obsidian Sound System, Narration Group and Synaptic Island; and have recently completed residencies with CRATE Margate in collaboration with Durham Gallery Ontario, and Languid Hands in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives. Shamica is also a New Contemporaries 2020 selected artist.