EPISODE 3: COREY HAYMAN Plastic Sounds of Dark Matter

“…possessing a black body through which history and fiction coexist…’*

Corey Hayman works across sculpture and moving-image to create connections between materials that explore afro-pessimism, the ‘hauntology of blackness’, notions of progress and capitalism. For Goldsmiths CCA she has created a new work that explores infrastructures of sound. Her installation positions sound machines (speakers, sound systems, hi-fi’s) as places which not only transmit, but themselves inhabit, sound. The space inside such structures is thus regarded as explorable and investigated for its imagined formal qualities and cultural mash ups. This line of enquiry sits alongside her ongoing use of the animated children’s TV character Rastamouse, who Hayman reads as a commodity who speaks, and a black body caught in a matrix of cultural representation, consumption and entertainment. His voice within this imagined space of the sound machine, and as sound wave, is smashed against waveforms of other kinds (that of water and the peak and troughs of the black progress narrative) to forge links between disparate histories. Histories which have worked to form and frame blackness. Hayman thus breaks down the structures that have permitted Rastamouse his existence, and so transpires across musical, poetic and visual references.

Corey Hayman is presented as part of Episodes, an ongoing series of solo presentations that cuts through the main programming at Goldsmiths CCA and provides a counterpoint to the larger-scale exhibitions. Spanning installations, screenings, discursive events and new commissions, the focus of this programme is to provide an experimental platform for emergent practices. The series has featured presentations by Oisín Byrne, Adam Christensen, and continues with Roland Carline (16 Nov 2019 – 12 Jan 2020).

BIOGRAPHY
Corey Hayman (b. 1990 Coventry) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University (g. 2018).

*Kara Walker in, Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, 2010, Duke University Press.