Speechcraft features a meeting of the international
public speaking club Toastmasters . Widely used
by businesspeople as well as trainee lawyers and politicians,
Toastmasters helps people from all walks of life to construct
their public presence so that they look and sound like ‘leaders’.
In the first commission of this piece the work was hosted by
the Oxford Toastmaster club Isis
Speakers.
Speechcraft is a performance work which takes a Toastmaster
meeting as a readymade performative situation. The artist inserts
specific subject matter for speakers to respond to by giving
an impromptu speech. In this version of the work, the subject
matter given to the speakers were all objects from Carey Young's
studio which she personally finds inspiring.
As with every Toastmaster meeting, all the resulting speeches
were judged and evaluated by other Toastmaster members,
as well as the audience, in a cycle of inspiration, review,
and reward.
Carey Young has written: “Speechcraft is in many senses
an opportunity for the invited public to think about the relationship
between art, artists and the public by presenting Toastmasters as
a kind of alternative space of creativity, interpretation,
ritual and critique.”
