A key aspect to the work I do as an artist is thinking through making. Ideas do not come from nowhere; seeds are planted at some point, carried through the air and land somewhere somehow, perhaps unexpectedly.
Repeated nurturing might make those seeds grow; a flash of a sensory experience might ignite something, a walk through a specific spatial arrangement might trigger a memory of a place, and experiencing an act or display of creativity might set me off on a journey into my imagination, searching for possible connections.
Creativity is a process, making something in reaction to something else. For me, it’s a conversation, a dialogue between myself and the things I am working with. When I make a painting, I work with layers, where each layer is a response to the one before, as if I am mapping an imaginary landscape, and exploring it as I go. Drawing is somewhat more immediate than painting, the line or mark of a pencil is the trace of a physical extension of the body. Gestures, sensations and feelings are inscribed on the paper as a physical manifestation of what is happening in the body.
I begin to scribble, reacting to what is around me, the cars in the car park outside the window, the sounds of the construction site over the road, the images I see in my head. As marks and shapes start to emerge on the paper, almost as if by accident, a base layer is already there, as there always is. A landscape is never a blank canvas.
The next step is working with it, onto it and into it. How can we make something with what we have?
Through the process of marking, looking and feeling, imaginary spaces emerge on the paper, wood or canvas. I develop the composition though playful colour relationships, balance of form and texture, the small shapes and the big shapes, zooming out and zooming in, and sometimes also cutting out and digging in. The work is not pre-determined, it emerges from what is there, and how I process it.
I am interested specifically in the relationship between the body and the spaces and places that bodies inhabit or pass through (both mine and other people). I explore how embodied experiences can be mapped through the process of making art, and how making art is, in its own way, a form of exploration.
Within this conceptual framework I use the materials I have to hand – particularly things you can make marks with – and initiate ways of making things collectively with others through workshops or participatory performances. I am interested in the process of transforming something into something else. Whether that be transforming sensory experience into artifacts, re-working previous artworks or re-imagining places and spaces through processed or manipulated sound.
The work I am presenting for the Sluice Biennial is based on a project I did in collaboration with BasementArtsProject in 2021. Sonic Landscapes was a participatory project that invited people from around the world to participate in a sound drawing activity. I invited participation through an open call, requesting drawings made in response to environmental sound. I asked participants to sit in a location of their choice and close their eyes while tuning in to the textures and rhythms of what they could hear around them and make marks in response to those sounds and how it made them feel. There was no right or wrong way to make the drawings, but I encouraged participants to not draw pictorially. So, not drawing a picture of a bird if hearing birdsong, but just listening to the sound, and letting the hand make its own gestures in response. Is it loud? Is it sharp? Is it rounded? Where does the sound go? Can you follow it? The idea was to let the drawing lead the way. If there were distractions, go with it, see where it leads.
I also asked for audio recordings of the sounds they were hearing. I collected the drawings and produced a digital collage. I connected lines and shapes, so that the drawings would flow into each other, as if creating a map of a continuous landscape that could be explored by zooming in and looking for details. I used the sound recordings to make an audio collage which accompanies the map.
The original iteration of this project was presented as a website. This all happened during the second lockdown, and so we created a virtual BasementArts exhibition space was exactly to scale, so that viewers could virtually visit the exhibition and see and hear the project as it was being created. Viewers could look at the drawings, hear the layered sonic environments, and create their own journey through this imaginary sonic landscape.
I encountered a problem during this process, which was to do with linearity, storytelling and maps. The soundtrack I made had a start, a middle and an end. It had a linear progression, a storyline if you like, it did not change. But my map, was anything but linear. It was full of lines, but it was more like a network of interconnections. The scale of each drawing, and the reach of each recording were different for each one, and the ways in which the drawings were connected did not allow for a linear progression of one sound to another sound. And in anycase, environmental sounds are not clean isolated samples, but complex, multilayered and messy. It occurred to me that I had no intention of making something linear, but rather that I was inspired by my late night Googlemap adventures of places I may or may not have been to. Zooming in searching for details and structures, interesting spatial arrangements and patterns, perhaps following a route, then zooming out and jumping to somewhere else. I wanted to make my process open to more possibilities and non-linear exploration and so I developed this work into a live audio performance with a video piece to accompany it.
This re-working of Sonic Landscapes is presented for the Sluice Biennial. A printed version of my map is on display within the BasementArts stand, and I will present my live performance at Vernacular Sounds at Two Brews bar on the 13th June 6pm.