The Hurrier [Art Installation]

'The Hurrier' is a new, expanded artist’s film work about labour, sex, time travel and working class women’s bodies: constructed through film experiments, improvisational performance and sound. The finished work was shown consecutively in two London gallery spaces in October and November, 2021: APT and Five Years.

This work as practice-led research into hidden histories and expanded film, is constructed across five screens using the structure of a 'sci-fi folk ballad' 'Poor on the Roll' composed by Robinson for the recorded soundtrack. The work incorporates improvised performance, costume elements, archive material, animation, and temporally disrupted, experimental editing. Throughout the 19th century, the artist's matrilineal ancestors were repeatedly summoned before the ‘Kirk Sessions’ (Scotland’s church courts) to be chastised and rebuked for the ’sin and scandal of formication’. They lived in a small coal-mining village in Scotland and some died in the workhouse, leaving only a record of their sexuality and debts. This work draws on archival material to explore the control of working class women’s bodies through labour and the policing of pleasure. The 'bodies' tell the stories through collaborative performance and sound in a work that uses movement, song, beats and transformative, uncanny objects to connect with the continued vilification and exploitation of working-class women’s bodies today.

As exhibited in these spaces, the exhibition 'Hurriers: Poor on the Roll' included works by collaborating artists: Kathleen Mullaniff and a live score event
The broader project incorporated a podcast on 'art, class and bodies' made in collaboration with There Feminist Library and In Process Radio and a small publication, made in two parts as broadsides: firstly with an essay by Frances Hatherley and second with the lyrics of the ballad: 'Poor on the Roll'.