Echo vs. Gown

Echo vs. Gown took two very different local texts as its starting point: the Loughborough Echo newspaper, and the Sport Science and Systems Engineering departments of the Loughborough University's web page. A dialectic duel was fought as an illustrated lecture between the costumed personifications ‘Echo’ and ‘Gown’; a live collage of absurd collisions in rhetoric, sound, text and image that mined the explosions, latent ideologies, varied human aspirations and mysteries of Loughborough life. The work mixed a bastardised rhetoric of didactic academic and tabloid address into a curdled, sinister and combustible fluid. It questioned habitual, and often complacent, processes of making sense of the world via media and explored the deceptive rhetoric of authority.

Jennet Thomas is an artist and filmmaker whose work emerged out of the experimental media club scene in the early 1990s. Often playful and funny, Jennet’s work deals with very human content, mixing visual and verbal puns with elements of the banal and bizarre to deconstruct and reconstruct the familiar into new, dissonant and poetically resonant forms.  A co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective Jennet’s numerous film works have been widely exhibited.