Sound Matters
28 Mar – 5 Jul 2015
Main Gallery
Sound Matters considers the connections between craft practice and sound art. Seven contemporary works have been selected to illustrate ways in which these two distinct practices collide. Exploring the physicality of sound, the works are characterised by both their sonic properties and materiality.
The makers and artists represented in this exhibition demonstrate how an engagement with sound also implicates an engagement with matter. With its equal emphasis on sound and form, Sound Matters offers a new and multi-sensory engagement with craft, with each work demanding to be heard as well as seen. With works of varying scale and volume, it is as important to listen as to look to fully experience the show.
About the Artists
Max Eastley
Max Eastley is an internationally recognised artist who combines kinetic sculpture and sound into a unique art form. His sculptures exist on the border between the natural environment and human intervention and use the driving forces of electricity, wind, water and ice. He has exhibited both interior and exterior works internationally. His work is represented in the permanent collection of the Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Since 2003 Max has been an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project (http://www.capefarewell.com), for whom he has created a number of installations, compositions and performances. From 2010 to 2013 he was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University, investigating Aeolian phenomena through artistic practice and historical research. He is also currently one of the artists involved in a project, Audible Forces, touring festivals in the UK, using the wind as an energy source.
Max’s largest solo exhibition in 2013 was at the Water Tower (Wasserturm) in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin: a cavernous, labyrinthine space inside which he installed ten acoustic sculptures. On the roof of the building he erected 8 Aeolian harps and their live sound was projected into the interior of the building to mix with the acoustic sounds inside. In 2014 he had a solo exhibition at the Teatroinscatola in Rome and took a residency in Bonn as the City Sound Artist, during which he created an Aeolian Installation at the Botanical Gardens.
He is well known as a musician and has played many solo concerts and also played with numerous other musicians such as David Toop, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, Alex Kolkowski, Rhodri Davies and John Butcher.
Keith Harrison
Keith Harrison was born in West Bromwich in the Black Country and from the age of 8 grew up in Birmingham. He didn’t intend or expect to be a ceramicist and in a bizarre set of circumstances was banned from the Ceramics room on the first day of his Art Foundation Course in Bournville. Whilst on the BA Industrial Design course at Cardiff he enjoyed the freedom and versatility of clay during one of the projects and later switched courses to Ceramics. Keith completed an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the RCA in 2002.
Since 2002 Keith has been involved in a series of process-based live public experiments that investigate the direct physical transformation of clay from a raw state utilising industrial and domestic electrical systems. The use of portable household appliances has enabled live firings to take place in alternative venues such as a living room, science laboratory, café and not-for-profit artist run spaces in Brighton and London. In addition, large-scale works have been realised for public galleries and Museums including the V&A, Jerwood Space, Camden Arts Centre and mima, Middlesbrough which take on the given space to produce site-specific time-based works.
http://www.keith-harrison.info/
Cathy Lane
Professor Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Her work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. She is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective. Aspects of her creative practice have developed out of these interests and include composition and installation-based work. She also writes and lectures on these and related subjects as well as collaborating with choreographers, film makers, visual artists and other musicians.
Books include Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (RGAP, 2008) and, with Angus Carlyle, In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with eighteen contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work and On Listening (2013) a collection of commissioned essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation and religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording.
Owl Project
Owl Project is a collaborative group of artists consisting of Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons. They work with wood and electronics to fuse sculpture and sound art, creating music making machines, interfaces and objects which intermix pre-steam and digital technologies.
Drawing on influences such as 70’s synthesiser culture, DIY woodworking and current digital crafts, the resulting artwork is a quirky and intriguing critique of the allure and production of technology.
Owl Project make a distinctive range of musical and sculptural instruments that question human interaction with computer interfaces and our increasing appetite for new and often disposable technologies.
By choosing wood as the main material for the iLog, Owl Project have extracted modern design principles but deflected it back to a traditional sensibility. This immediately raises questions about modern desire for disposable technology and nostalgia surrounding traditional crafts.
Scanner and Ismini Samanidou
Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, is an internationally acclaimed artist and composer. He explores the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating multi-layered sound pieces spanning a diverse array of genres, from scores and compositions to multi-media performances, product design and fashion campaigns.
Since 1991, Scanner has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings. Recent projects include a solo show, Scanner: A Month in the Life of an Artist at Melkweg, Amsterdam and performances for Elemental Force, a series of large-scale outdoor shows at historic buildings. In 2012, he premiered an ambitious audio-visual spectacle based on the songs of Joy Division with Heritage Orchestra.
Ismini Samanidou specialises in woven textiles. Transcending the boundaries of craft, art and design, she combines digital technologies and traditional craft techniques to explore how textiles can articulate narrative and space. Her woven textiles link cultural history and place in both small-scale hangings and extensive installations.
Samanidou trained at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited work internationally; recent exhibitions include the solo show Topography: Recording Place – Mapping Surface at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, now touring the USA. Samanidou’s work can be found in public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
http://www.isminisamanidou.com/
Studio Weave
Founded in 2006, Studio Weave is an award-winning RIBA Chartered Architecture Practice based in London. We balance a joyful, open-minded approach with technical precision to create a diverse body of work in the UK and abroad for public, private and commercial clients. We value idiosyncrasies, from the characteristics that make somewhere unique, to the particular skills of a master craftsperson. We aim to harness the strengths of a project and its team to create something distinctive and of exceptional quality. Our work has been acknowledged by numerous awards including RIBA South East Building of the Year 2013 for Ecology of Colour, the Architectural Review’s International Emerging Architecture Awards and the Civic Trust Awards where The Longest Bench won the Special Award for Community Impact and Engagement.
Dominic Wicox and Yuri Suzuki
Dominic Wilcox creates unique and innovative objects, drawings and installations, inspired by everyday environments and human interactions. Layered with a dry wit, his work places a spotlight on the banal; adding a new, alternative perspective on things that are taken for granted.
Since graduating from London’s Royal College of Art in Design Products in 2002, his work has been exhibited and published worldwide. Wilcox has worked on a number of commissions for organisations and brands including Nike and Esquire. In 2012, projects included the design of a pair of shoes with inbuilt GPS to guide the wearer home, and the launch of Variations on Normal, a book of his invention drawings.
A sound artist, designer and electronic musician, Yuri Suzuki explores sound through designed objects. With sound evermore reduced to data, Suzuki creates objects that give new meaning to obsolete analogue technology. Often using the vinyl record as raw material, he lends sound a new physicality.
A Design Products postgraduate from the Royal College of Art, London, Suzuki founded his studio in 2008 to create his own work and commissions for major brands. His sound art pieces and installations have been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally and in 2013 he published his first book, B-side of Onomatopeic Music, a collection of visualisations of soundscapes.
