Jessica Payne

Screams is a collection of short audiovisual works, created in response to a historical control and fetishisation of women’s voices. This work uses the scream as a form of gender expression – exploring it as an autonomous, controlled, abject, and reclaimed sound. Clay is used to represent gendered anatomy, blended with machine noise and imagery to blur lines of objectification.

The work aims to challenge normative representations and functions of women’s bodies and voices by reclaiming my own scream through re-synthesis and audio manipulation. Through synthesis, my scream is de-constructed and objectified, pieced back together, and reclaimed. Synthesisers allow me to tear out the abrasive textures of the scream and announce anxieties of gender oppression.

Appreciating the scream, appreciates the power of a sonic weapon most of us possess. In using basic materials, the work exists as encouragement and incitement to scream. Stitching together physical and digital materials to create a practice that allows for the reclamation of these screams. The scream is not a submission to victimhood, but instead the act that breaks us free of its confines. In screaming, we reclaim a voice, and a space once taken. As screams pass onto me, I pass on my own Scream, reclaiming an expression of pain and anger toward gender oppressions and sexual assault.

Scream, and take up space.

This short animation is intended to be on an eternal loop.

Blood, hot flushes, and tears. Tangled red material voices the internal monstrous. A fear that becomes the mundane every day. Situated in an endless loop, using stop motion to trap viewers in a tiny set. The work becomes a rhythmic and musical piece, highlighting the stillness of an endless cycle as rhythm and movement become stagnant in their repetition. Using short-form animation to represent menstrual depression appreciates the power of stop motion as a medium, the damage of a hormonal cycle is optimistically minimised through a cartoonish presentation that purposely trivialises these intense struggles, depicting what feels like a desperate infinite loop.

Internal horrors are represented through a disembodied wave, externally presenting the horrors of the internal to intensify sound design and synthesis. The sounds of my stomach re-synthesised to provide the wave a surreal power. In loop, sound is unchanging, creating a viewing experience that mimics the tiring and repetitive cycle of depression. This work opens conversation for education by portraying the cultural and internal anxieties toward periods. Though the film intends to highlight the physical and mental limits of the endless loop of menstrual depression, a positive message is found as the loop persists, keep building the raft.

Baaa (2025) uses metamorphosis as a form of human dissection. This piece depicts the agony and beauty of life as a sheep under capitalism through a childlike lens and set design. In the body of a sheep, with the same mental capabilities, what do we deserve? And where is our worth materialised? A character faces the horrors of short and reductive farm animal life.