Barbara Campbell's performance began with a melismatic voice that seemed to be coming out of nowhere - Mina Kanaridis high on a walkway in the atrium of the ABC Ultimo Centre in recital of the Mass for Four Parts by William Byrd (1543-1623). Opposite, separated from the voice by the otherwise 'empty' space of the atrium, stood Barbara Campbell in Elizabethan costume. A's Karinidis sang, Campbell unwound her dress, a spiral of black ribbon embroidered in blood-red with text from Mary, Queen of Scot's Casket Letter, Number I1I, and lowered it, centimetre by centimetre, into the crowd assembled below. This issue of ribbon, lengthy enough to reach the ground from the 'tower' and to circulate amongst the crowd, became the counterpart/point of the material that was the recital. Text, written or spoken (here, sung), literally derives from the Latin texere: to weave or compose - to make material. Materiality took three forms throughout the performance: the voice weaving its gossamer high above the heads ofthe crowd; secondly, the falling ribbon/text, and thirdly, the depthless pixels of the video image of the artist.
A video camera tracked the performance in close up as if scanning the dress/text line by line and relaying it in electronic wavelengths to the viewers gathered aroundthe monitors below. Eyeballing the performer's 'slow reveal', the camera dismembered, fetishised Campbell's body as she turned her skirt to ribbon, rotating in an ironical twist - a double exposure of writing (on ribbon and video monitor) and skin.
Campbell's performance literally resonated: mass reading of the dress/letter was interwoven with Mass listening; the release of voice/breath into the air, a metaphor of the release ofthe spirit from the body at the point of death. The decapitation (and severing of the vocal chords) that forms the denouement of Mary's story was paralleled by the chasm between Karinidis' voice and Campbell's body.