Lou Sheppard

Lou Sheppard is a Canadian artist working in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. While at Rupert Lou will be researching traditional Lithuanian folk singing and its role in the country’s political revolution to create a series of vocal scores that reflect on ecological and political resistance, and speculative queer futures.

While at Rupert Lou will be researching traditional Lithuanian folk singing, and how it been used as a point of assembly and unification in Lithuania’s Singing Revolution (Dainuojanti Revoliucija). The shared bodily experiences of choral singers provide a structure for thinking through experiences of expanded bodily boundaries and post-human embodiment: choir members singing together experience synchronous breath, heartbeats and other biorhythms as well as a euphoric sense of being of one single body. The polyphonic harmony structures in Lithuanian folk songs, however, point to possibilities of hybridity and multiplicity within this experience, possibilities that resonate queerly within a more-than-human experience. Lou will use this research to create a series of vocal scores that reflect on these more-than-human, post-human, non-human experiences as possibilities of ecological and political resistance, and speculative queer futures. 

Rights of Passage, Lou Sheppard (2022). Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid