The Brexit Lexicon (2018) is a two-channel video work that explores the store of metaphors and verbiage that have become the stock-in-trade for politicians and journalists during the UK’s exit from the Europe Union. Creating a compendium of the most common terms that have shaped the way the UK and the EU have described current political discussions associated with Brexit, the lexicon is recited by a newscaster who appears at a desk in an anonymous news television studio against a green-screen, reading from a teleprompter. The broadcast itself remains unedited; included are the newscaster’s hesitations, mistakes and pauses to drink from a bottle of water. Through its artifice, the work investigates the ways in which Brexit was reported through a combination of truths, mistruths and ‘media noise’, in turn asking questions about the how language is wielded within a post-truth context.
