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No Whole Truths

Johannah Latchem

VANE

18-27 July 2019
Wednesday – Saturday 12 noon – 5pm

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No Whole Truths (2019) is a three-channel film and sound installation that addresses the multiplicity of ‘truths’ in legal spaces. On the central wall a video documentary plays of the artist’s 2018 public procession work, Carry the Woman You Forgot. This was a procession in which My Bloody Oar was carried along Newcastle’s quayside by two uniformed naval servicemen. It left the seventeenth-century Guildhall Courtroom for Trinity House, the 500-year-old corporation that supports the important maritime community of Newcastle and beyond.

 

On the walls to the left and right of the large central video projection, are a series of still images of the Newcastle Guildhall Court and a film of Newcastle Town Moor. All three films are carefully synchronised to a soundscape; the rhythmical creaking of the floorboards of the Guildhall courtroom and an insistent tempo maintained by the repetition of two key notes, reflect a sense of time passing and the pressure to deliberate.  Individuals who were convicted and sentenced to death at the Guildhall courtroom were conveyed to Newcastle Town Moor, the site of their public execution. Post execution dissection was more feared than death itself. The text ‘what will happen to my body?’ that appears over the film of the Moor, is a direct quote from a convicted Newcastle woman to her clergyman. Latchem makes the link between these two seemingly disparate locations and addresses legal space and its objects in relation to the body and the many perspectives on the ‘truth’ and power. 

 

Thanks to: Trinity House Newcastle, Newcastle University, and Northumbria Wood Turners. Sound technical in collaboration with David de la Haye. Sound sample of floor recorded by Tim Shaw. Filming of oar procession by Alan Fentiman Film.