Dear friend, I can no longer hear your voice: lamentation and conjuring ghosts as strategies for survival

I gave a lecture at the 'Ghosts in Britain and Ireland 1500-1950' History Conference, Mary Immaculate College, in association with Ulster University, The University of Melbourne, Irish Historical Studies, The Hunt Museum and Limerick Museum

Abstract:
Dear friend, I can no longer hear your voice: lamentation and conjuring ghosts as strategies for survival

In 2022 I made a short animated film, Dear Friend, I can no longer hear your voice, for a solo exhibition of the same name which took place at the Sir John Soane’s Museum London.

Dear Friend’s… use of female choral soundtrack grew from a willful act of conjuring from archival fragments; the film became an act of feminist retrieval of the material culture of a lost room, and through discovering diaries, family letters and shopping lists, to give form to the contours of the life of a long dead woman, Eliza, the wife of 18th century architect John Soane.

In exploring British architect John Soane’s hidden use of memorialization, and my own interest in contemporary forms of lamentation, gender and otherness, I will explore the spectral – both visual and auditory – as explored in contemporary art practice also as markers of the over-looked and forgotten; fissures; what is about to slip away, and how techniques of estrangement can reignite realities in current social and political landscapes.

Biography:
Anne-Marie Creamer, Artist, also Senior Lecturer and researcher, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.

Anne-Marie Creamer is a Senior Lecturer for the Art Programme at Central Saint Martins (CSM) and co-leads the innovative social prescribing hub Making Better. Creamer is also a patient-researcher, interested in lived experience as knowledge.

As a visual artist based in London, Creamer's work spans film, animation, drawing, and writing. She explores encounters with overlooked, forgotten histories, delving into how art works can be a kind of “spectral conjuring” creating space for ethical remembering, and inspiring societal change. Following her keynote lecture Bittersweet Belonging: An Impossible Return (University of Gloucestershire in 2022), Routledge’s forthcoming Home, Place, and Belonging Through Arts-Based Research (2025). Her latest project (in research and development), Ghost-Bodies, examines spinal neuroanatomy and numbness, using lived experience to reimagine embodiment and spatial perception.

Anne-Marie has recently had a solo exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum London, Dear Friend, I can no Longer Hear Your Voice, produced by Animate Projects, UK. Dear Friend was presented at the Koffler Center for the Arts, Toronto, Canada, in 2023.

She has also regularly exhibited internationally at galleries and museums such as: FRAC Bretagne, (France), Yantai Contemporary Art Museum, China, Exeter Phoenix Galley, Exeter, UK), Camberwell Space, University of the Arts London, Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum (Norway), Palm Springs Art Museum, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim (The Netherlands), Apex Art (New York), Communication Space Školská 28, (Prague, Czech Republic), Sagacho bis (Tokyo), Galerie der Künstler (Munich), and Spacex Gallery (Exeter). Publications that feature her work include The Drawing Book, edited by Tania Kovats (Black Dog Publishing, 2006). She received the Derek Hill Scholarship in Drawing at British School at Rome, 2012. She has done several residencies and collaborative projects in Soviet Union, Czech Republic, and Romania, including an International Artist in Residence award with the Centre for Contemporary Art Prague (2004-5). During the 1990's she one of a number of a group of artists responsible for the London based artist-run Cubitt Gallery. Anne-Marie still occasionally curates exhibitions and projects, most recently in Norway, with Lars Sture & Kjetil Berge for the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum in western Norway. She was educated at Middlesex University & the Royal College of Art and lives in London, where she is a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Links:
Website: https://amcreamer.net
Dear Friend (including a link to the video and stills, along with an essay on the work: https://www.soane.org/exhibitions/anne-marie-creamer-dear-friend-i-can-no-longer-hear-your-voice
UAL: https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/224-annemarie-creamer

• https://www.mic.ul.ie/news/2025/spectres...
• https://anzamems.org/cfp-ghosts-in-brita...
• https://theaha.org.au/conference-ghosts-...
• https://arthistory.case.edu/2025/07/ghos...
• https://pure.ulster.ac.uk/en/activities/...
• https://emslimerick.wordpress.com/resear...
• https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/spooky-limer...
• https://amcreamer.net
• https://www.soane.org/exhibitions/anne-m...
• https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/224-annem...