Voice Urns: Rendering The Immaterial, Material

Voice Urns is a work I formed through my interest and broad research of the human voice, considering how strange it is that nothing remains of it when we die, except recordings. For the body, bones remain but a voice has no physical equivalent. Does the voice just disappear into the earth or the atmosphere? What’s left of it? What is a voice?

Voice Urns consists of 12 transparent glass urns, each containing various residual materials, and each having a title evocative of someone’s voice who is no longer living. The installation includes titles of voices we all know, as well as titles of voices from my own personal life, each with accompanying residuals evocative of vocal materiality.

Voice Urns encompasses my interests in voice, deterioration and decay, the natural world, and residuals. Residuals being evocative of traces of the body, or of something/someone which is no longer physically present. These materials themselves were collected over time and sourced from my own natural environment, from felled cypress trees, to ash from forest fires, to sea foam from the Oregon coast.

In my surmounting research about voice, I determine that if voices do go anywhere after death, it’s the air, the earth, the landscape, the bark of a tree, the blades of grass, the grain of the earth, and the air of the atmosphere. The Origin of the Voice speaks to this, earth being the biggest urn of them all.

Through my imagined drawings of the voice (Voice Shadows), glass vessels containing various residual materials (Voice Urns) and vortex chamber (The Origin of The Voice), I want to highlight the non-physical presence of the voice, in a physical way, along with my ideas and questions about what a voice is and where it goes.

Eliana Glass (b.1997) is a singer, pianist, and visual artist. Born in Australia and raised in Seattle, she began singing and playing piano from a young age. Currently based in New York, Eliana pursues her passions of music, visual art and writing, continuously gaining insight into each medium through the other.

www.eliana.work