Cathy Lane is an artist, composer and academic. She works primarily in sound, combining oral history, archival recordings, spoken word and environmental recordings to investigate histories, environments, our collective and individual memories and the forces that shape them. She is inspired by places or themes which are rooted in every day experience and particularly interested in ‘hidden histories and historical amnesia and how this can be investigated from a feminist perspective through the medium of composed sound.  

I listened to her work Hidden lives, in which I could hear a lot of voice repetition around the left and right channels. This left me with a feeling of overwhelm and a gradual reduction of the lower frequencies of the sound. In the synopsis, Cathy Lane’s inspiration for this piece was the repetition of domestic tasks performed by women around the house, and I think the repetitive musical sounds may have come from the command of the male gaze. In different times women have been the ones who have taken on this invisible work in the home. They are confined to the house and don’t spend too much time outside or away from this confined life.

After listening to this piece, I was very moved by it. Because in our family too it is my mother who does the various chores, and we some times take for granted that we will leave this matter of housework to the women in the family. We men sometimes don’t even do the housework, or even complain about the women in the family because of some work pressure or other pressures, which is also a sign of male gazing. I think we should reflect on this.