Artist-in-Residence: Alice Zawadzki

What does it mean to speak of origins? Most of us realistically come from a tangle of memories, languages, landscapes and narratives. Fragments survive but we lose the settings from which they sprang; we’ve all described someone ‘showing their true colours’ despite having never raised a flag from a ship! Origins are obscured by the mud of the day.

I’m writing two new bodies of work that make space for this digging, and developing my chamber opera Bag of Bones, where a hybrid ensemble of extraordinary musicians led by violinist Rakhi Singh will go deeper into the mode of ritual and communal release. For Replace Your Gods, sonic voyagers Midori Jaeger and Yusuf Ahmed join me in a project I’ve longed to do for years – building my own instruments using amplified wood, grasses, water, glass and bone. December concludes the series with The Turning, a seasonal romp with a litany of pre-Christian monsters, faeries, tricksters and bringers of light.

I know it’s possible when I’m joined by artists whose crafts are fed by such multitudinous sensibilities.

I also write this as a new mother; somewhere in the deluge of milk, tears, blood, and broken sleep is a seedling, growing from the debris of an old self. I gaze at my daughter and contemplate what we’ll hold on to, what we should leave behind. I remember how one night, in conversation with the poet Rommi Smith, I described my wish for the message in Bag of Bones to be as universal as possible – I worried it was too specific to my family history, perhaps even indulgent. She replied that I must dig even deeper still. The realness, she said, might be precisely what allows it to speak to somebody else.

It’s my sincere wish that you’ll find something of yourself in it.