How can you make oral history recordings sing? Emily Candela, Mary Hopper and Leona Fensome present their work and discuss working with museums and institutions with local communities.
Slag Speaks - Emily Candela
‘Slag Speaks’ centres on a seemingly unassuming specimen found in the backroom archive of the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham: a small chunk of slag, cast off by a Bilston steelworks in the 1950s. Slag is an industrial by-product of steel production that is found all around the post-industrial West Midlands. While it is indelibly linked to the region, it lacks the public attention reserved for monuments and the monetary value of the glistening minerals displayed in the front of the museum. Slag is easily dismissed. But it is a persistent and powerful reminder of the industrial past. ‘Slag Speaks’ is a polyvocal life story of slag, including voices of a steelworker, curator, geologist and the fictional voice of slag herself. Together, these voices stitch together themes of labour, the blurring line between human-made and natural, and the dynamics of the often-overlooked, or ‘slagged-off’ industrial byproduct and post-industrial region.
‘Slag Speaks’ is a podcast pilot produced by Emily Candela in partnership with the Lapworth Museum. It is part Emily’s Arts Council funded Sonic Minerals project that sits at the intersection of her audio and experimental history practices, and explores the role podcasting can play in museums.
Emily Candela is a historian and artist working across sound, writing, and curating. She focuses on histories of science and design, and ways that history can be researched and written through sound. She is currently completing the Sonic Minerals podcasting project,
in partnership with the Lapworth Museum of Geology at the University of Birmingham. Emily previously produced the Atomic Radio podcast (Science Museum/Resonance FM), and was awarded the 2021 Design Writing Prize by the Design History Society. Her writing appears in numerous publications including the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums. She is currently a Senior Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art on the Masters of Research (MRes) program.
Fisherman’s Tales - Mary Hooper
Local sound artist Mary Hooper will be talking about her 15 year long project with Hastings Fishermens Protection Society (HFPS) and Yasmin Ornsby. Delving into how they designed a showcase to house composed extracts of oral history, and created an immersive exhibition, designed by Jane Bruce, with moving image by Nichola Bruce & Sam Sharples, at Hastings Contemporary from March 28th - September 14th 2025. Yasmin, who is the senior director of HFPS, and Mary have slowly recorded and collated the oral history of Fishermen of Hastings Fleet, one of the oldest surviving sustainable beach launched fishing fleets in the UK.
Mary Hooper’s practice is site-specific, using a wide range of materials and processes to create installations, objects, and sound-works. She collaborates with artists from different disciplines, writers and musicians, incorporating research into the narratives of place, people, the patina of human occupation, and the geographical impact of the location on our sense of identity.
The theme that constantly fascinates her is ‘Sense of Place’ and how that develops over time.
Mary has worked as an artist and consultant for Arts in Healthcare, is a founder member of Radiator Community Arts Company established in Hastings in 2004. Mary has been commissioned to make work for Hospitals, Health centres, Gallery and Museum exhibitions, and created installations and performances in the South East, Southport, Leeds, Hull, Bridport, Harwich, Deptford and Eastbourne.
Mary Hooper
Hosted by Leona Fensome
Leona Fensome is the Creative Director and Cultural Historian of Inkslingers Media, a multi award-winning audio production company creating radio programmes, audio documentaries, and oral history collections from community heritage stories. Her work has won Gold at the Independent Podcast Awards, Bronze at the Audio Production Awards and Gold and Silver at the Community Radio Awards.
She is a second-year, practice-led PhD researcher with the School of Computing, Engineering and Creative Industries, at the University of Bedfordshire (UoB), exploring the development of British student radio.
Oral history based series include: The Making of Black Britain, radio documentary and podcast: Tape Letters Iron-to-Iron Bike Ride radio documentary: Oral historian for the Communicating Connections project, Oral historian for the A County Remembers project: a partnership project with Herts Archives and St Albans Museum.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonafensome/