Dysfluency

Maya Osborne tests the water at Charlie Godet Thomas' Vitrine exhibition

When I can’t sleep at night, I like to imagine myself in a tent with the sound of rain falling onto the canvas. A soft blanket patter, even the imaginary noise grounds me, the proximity to deluge. An incongruence of perilous housing now dots the streets of London in the form of tents. Often on pavements beneath underpasses and sheltered from the weather, they are zipped up tight against the fumes of the city with its parade of liquidity or concomitant threats of destitution.

Themes of liquidity and weathering precarity play out centrally in Little Sound, Charlie Godet Thomas’s current show at Vitrine Gallery. A temporary water feature fitted to the ceiling lightly rains into aluminium vessels dotted across the floor. Brief, evocative lyrical texts, such as THE FALLING OF LEAVES and THE TAPPING OF FINGERS, are cut into their sides, rendering them deficient as watertight containers.

This piece, titled ‘Dysfluent Sound (Water)’ was first shown at NASAL gallery, Mexico City, installed in a concrete space that amplified the dripping to cacophonic heights. The sound in Vitrine is softer but defiant. It plays as music that refuses background relegation, like rain on a tin roof, or as a resonant splash that chimes with an internal trickle, which is where I feel it: vital fluid flowing through my body, visceral drips of the digestive system.

In this work, the water that flows from the ceiling draws attention to the notion of dysfluency, the flow of speech involuntarily disrupted, stammering, repeated words and sounds. Thomas’s work is clever: potent yet subtle. I imagine a dysfluent flow, constant and constantly interrupted, refusing fluency as a means to flow.

A series of works titled ‘Fix’ hang on the walls of the gallery, pools of clear cast rubber holding assemblages of colourful paper. On close inspection, tiny air bubbles can be seen in the rubber. The paper is alive beneath the surface, its breath caught in a chaotic grammar of gurgles that rise to meet the splash of water. The painted floor is covered in a sheen of wet, errant rainfall around the vessels, and the gallerist worries that someone will slip over. Or perhaps the puddles will leak down into the basement to create a new, haphazard Dysfluent Song. The gallery is leaking, or the ceiling itself, as though it were ice, melting and bringing the place down drop by drop; powerful, a little chaos.

Outside in the gallery’s yard a text work is strung up against the whitewashed wall. It reads COME HOME and then, beneath that, COME BACK. On the floor, the letters W, E and L lie in disarray, enjoining the hanging texts to signal a timely return. Until a few months ago, home for Thomas was Mexico City, and the sentiment of these texts is wonderfully open: a WEL/COME homecoming or, read without WEL, yearning to COME BACK or a demand to COME HOME that raises questions about where Thomas now calls home.

When home ceases to exist as a physical space, it remains a volatile place we return to in our minds, living on after it has been abandoned or destroyed. The text EXPANDING TIMBERS is cut into one of the vessels. It makes me think of the wooden floor thickening, sodden with water – and the accompanying aural grammar, gleaming floorboards swelling and creaking.

Words by Maya Osborne. Charlie Godet Thomas’ ‘Little Sound’ runs at Vitrine Fitzrovia from 31 May to 13 July 2024