Publication accompanying performance with supplemental text and image telling the story of the Good Shepherd, 1907-1973
Riah Buchanan, A Mother is a Clock, The Chapel Performance Space, March 2019
A Mother is a Clock is a performance, video and publication staged at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle. The project uses audio never been heard before in a public setting, recently
digitized from poor quality cassette tapes from 1999. These tapes were the result of an oral history project by archivist Toby G. Harris. The video layers the stories of ‘wayward’ girls and
the nuns who were charged with reforming them at a Catholic girls home in the 1950s, resulting in a complex portrait of an all-female community. The recordings extend to the expanded text in the publication, and even to the building itself, to produce a feeling of being inside and outside the stories, and spaces, at the same time.
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