Gen Doy

The Milk of Human Kindness

15th November 2015 - 9th January 2016

Gen Doy has made her new piece The Milk of Human Kindness responding to the m2 site as a former dairy. The title of this work is a phrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth Act 1 scene 5, where Lady Macbeth tells Macbeth that he is basically too “soft” and not a ruthless murderer. She, on the other hand, says she would have killed her own baby while it was breastfeeding to get what she wanted. So how valued is the milk of human kindness in contemporary society? Hopefully more than the milk of cows, selling at less than production cost, poured onto a supermarket floor by struggling small-scale dairy farmers.

Over the course of the exhibition, milk bottles will be added to the installation, together with the texts of messages and reports testifying to acts of kindness gleaned from a variety of sources. Some are small acts, some seemingly more important, but all appreciated.  Especially significant, in my view, are acts of kindness and humanity towards people fleeing their homelands due to economic and political persecution. 

“I work with still and moving images, written and spoken texts, and above all with sound, to construct narratives that are not linear, but suggestive and open to creative interpretation by the viewer/listener. The voice has become central to my work, as I exploit its sensual and seductive potential, evoking people, events, and meanings - hidden or forgotten. I like to construct works from recordings made in the field or on-site, and voice recordings made on-site as well, not in the studio. I also perform live.

I enjoy working in sites of cultural and historical significance, attempting to bring out the “voice” or “voices” present in that site. Among sites I have responded to are a dairy in a national trust house (Uppark House); the Church of St Peter and St Paul at Caistor (with Lynn Dennison); the Asylum Chapel, Peckham, South London; a disused windmill; Oxford House Chapel, Weavers’ Fields, East London (with Lynn Dennison); and a hole dug in the ground in the garden of a historic vicarage in London, about to be taken over by developers.

Through a sensual and emotional engagement, I would like viewers and listeners to consider the wider social, cultural and political contexts in which my work is made, and in which they and their experience of my work exists. 

I often work with materials from the past, attempting to suggest through these that we can reflect on, and engage with, the present”.