“I wasn’t prepared for the remarkable focus, ingenuity, and invention behind her incredible new album Solo Throat (Otoroku), in which her vast oeuvre of extended techniques, literary inspiration, and improvisational thinking come together into something far more profound and jaw-dropping than the sum of its parts.”
“Mitchener’s versatility was to the fore in a graphic rendition of the piece, producing a tightly controlled primal scream as she literally found her voice, all aglow with the light of her upper range.”
“Mitchener’s performance was quite simply extraordinary. She held nothing back in her traversal of the enormous vocal range of the work, and her total inhabiting of the character was the enduring memory of the evening.”
“Mitchener inhabited King George’s fracturing identities with an unsettling intensity.”
“With one degree of separation, ‘Eight Songs’ records the sound of the injured and dying from a war between colonial powers. Mitchener’s version shows another vector of that violence: the foundational barbarity wreaked by empire on a different set of bodies.”
“The ensemble exit the stage to Alison Knowles’s Shuffle, concluding a powerful evening of profound reflection on women’s influence in the world.”
“My thoughts for Art Review on British Art Show 9 – currently at Aberdeen Art Gallery then touring to Wolverhampton, Manchester & Plymouth. Highlights: Kathrin Böhm, Elaine Mitchener, Abigail Reynolds & Hrair Sarkissian.”
“Equally powerful and evocative is Elaine Mitchener‘s sound installation [NAMES II] (2019-2021), memorialising some of the 2,000 enslaved African people owned by an Aberdeenshire sugar planter in Jamaica.”
“Elaine Mitchener’s poignant (NAMES II) is a roll-call of the 2,000 enslaved African people owned by an 18th century Jamaican sugar planter, whose family came from Aberdeenshire.”
