Elizabeth Price: ‘I’m interested in music and the voice because it brings a very different sensual and emotional register to the work’

Studio International visited Elizabeth Price in her studio in south-east London to talk to her about her work A Restoration, made for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

Elizabeth Price outlined the important role sound plays within her multilayered creative practice.  “Many of the works start off with quite a rational, almost procedural, approach to historical materials, but they always move into, or end up in, something that’s more like a song,” she said.

Price also discusses her residency at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space, the Science & Technology Council’s Space Science Department, where she became fascinated with photographic images of the sun, from the late-18th century to the present day. This archive, she tells us, is “scientifically purposeful and strangely melancholy”, and she has used these images in three works, “placing a dramatic situation of sight for everything else that happens in the work”.

Price is currently curating an exhibition for Hayward Touring, In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy, which opens at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in June.

Interview by MK PALOMAR
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY