starlings’ lament, keeners’ dirge

I curl in my fingers - nails grazing skin - then unfurl again.
Let my hands’ heat into the air.
It becomes part of this landscape…

Lu Rose Cunningham wrote and recorded starlings’ lament, keeners’ dirge whilst a resident at Wysing Arts Centre. During a residency there, Lu explored the wilder parts of the site, mapping the land through field recordings and writing. The resulting poems and soundscape considered loss - of voices, traditions, and our relationships with nature, the non-human - and treated the act of walking as time for meditation and recognition.
When working on the piece Lu was inspired by the old Irish tradition of caoníním, a non-verbal song sung by women at wakes, also known in English as keening. The result resembles a collective grieving but also remembers past oral histories and celebrates life, leaving and then returning to the earth. It is both a lament and lullaby, bearing witness to the environmental and social impacts of our existences, to our own fragilities, and to quiet moments of beauty felt through attention and care.

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Lu Rose Cunningham is an artist and writer. Her practice looks at the performative potential of language, works made emerging as performances or soundscapes utilising voice and movement, and written words in the form of publications and print. Exploring language as a holistic embrace, she seeks to use voices and field recordings to reflect the mutuality between people and the spaces they dwell in. Spaces and bodies interact as a feedback loop, collecting and exhaling each other’s rhythm. The sounds and words she gathers touch on history and embedded memories within landscapes, and present sound as an archival medium; a space for sharing narratives and intimacy. In recent years, Lu has exhibited performances at Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Gallery Wakefield, South London Gallery, and HuMBase, Stuttgart. She is also the author of pamphlet For Mary, Marie, Maria: after the nectar, pyre and linden tree, and Interval: House, Lover, Slippages, published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021 and 2022.