Mollspeak
Museum of the Home
12 June 2021
Eleven-channel sound installation and radio broadcast. Shortlisted for the 2023 New Music Scotland sonic art award.
Mollspeak is an immersive sound installation in the Undercroft space commissioned by Sinead McCarthy at Museum of Home, London. Made in collaboration with French composer Olivier Pasquet.
The experimental lyrical piece is voiced by acclaimed British actor, Maxine Peake. It reveals the pains, desires and routines of 18th-century maid servants, drawing from extensive archival research and objects in the Museum's collections.
The work is an ever-changing composition of word and sound, highlighting the interchangeability of servants: visitors will never hear the same version twice.
My script mingles new research with historic poetic form to give voice to a working class maid servant's story – reflecting on her duties, her desires and her place in the world – to create a plainly spoken, yet lyrical portrait. This servant's box would have held personal belongings. The accompanying soundscape is created with 3D sound scans of these personal objects from the Museum's collection, including a tinder box, a teaspoon, a candlestick, a horn cup and a paper doll.
Mollspeak, is an eighteenth-century phrase employers coined to mock their servants' dialectical speech.
Read more about the composer Olivier's process in Mollspeak
Opened 12 June 2021. Funded by Arts Council England, Arts Fund & The Elephant Trust.
A broadcast edit of Mollspeak is touring:
12.09.21 - 13.09.21 Resonance FM
27.12.21 - 09.01.22 Mercurious Magazine online
14.02.22 Radiophrenia