Installations

The two sound installations detailed here are the most recent in a series of installations that began in 1984. Both Speakers and Field Study used recorded environmental sounds as well as digitally processed voices.

Field Study no 1 (1999)

Field Study no 1 is almost an enlarged detail of Speakers. The piece is an installation with a grid of images and speakers suspended about 10cm in front of a wall drawing. The eight images are details from the Lamentation fresco by Giotto and focus on the unintentional boundary lines between the painted figures, created by the fresh plaster laid down for each days painting. In the case of the sections chosen for this piece the sky appears to be carved into sections which 'enfold' each figure. The sound explored the idea of tonal similarities and timbral differences of two voices singing the same words and notes in and out of phase with each other.

Speakers (1998)

Speakers was a site-specific installation created for the Mid-Pennine Art Gallery, Lancashire, England, as part of the NWAB Arts, Science and Technology exhibition series.

The installation consisted of a field of 24 audio speakers suspended in a grid form across a large space. The speakers were configured in different sound groupings so that specific sounds were spatially fixed or 'coded' and then layered in different temporal permutations. The listener, moving through the space, measuring difference at every point in the room, created the main element of time in the piece. The idea was to create a 'dematerialised' listening space.

The piece depended on a suspended sense of time - an expanded moment. It wasn't a narrative but an environment to move within. It's the audiences thought movement or physical movement through the piece that actually constructs it.

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