GroundWork Gallery
16 March – 8 June 2024
Becoming-Tree
Three sound pieces composed from field recordings in Val Taleggio re-constructed for the space at Groundwork gallery.
Parlour of Psithurism
A sound installation where listeners sit underneath old repurposed hairdryers playing the whispers of wind and breath.
Psithurism is the sounds of wind blowing through trees, it comes from the greek word whisper. The theme for the residency at NAHR that was completed in August was ‘air’. Drawing from the sound piece ‘lungs’ from the Nothing but Bark and Bone project completed at the residency, the sounds of breath, the wind through leaves and cars on the road are woven together in a composition exploring the symbiotic passing of breath between vegetal and fleshy bodies and the sounds that might threaten to pollute that breath.
The queer, out of place, lost technology of the hairdryer will be used as a playful listening medium as it is not only a symbol of care and attention but also has connotations with the conversations between woman that are so often dismissed as gossip but that actually have a role in building communities. This attention, care, and conversational feminist entanglements with the object contextualise the soughing sounds as voices to listen to, care for and build communities with. The hairdryers are more intimate listening spaces to suit the more delicate sound piece.
To accompany the sound piece there will be a magazine to flick through, identifying the unique sounds of different trees and leaves as they are activated by wind, air and breath. (Needle-like leaves of conifer create high-pitched sounds, flat leaves create fluttering sounds)
Arts for the Environment Exhibition:
“Intra-actions involve transformative encounters, seductive moments that generate new modes of coexistence.”
‘Building on the notion of intra-actions as illustrated by the American feminist theorist Karen Barad, the AER Art for the Environment international residency programme, launched at the University of the Arts London by Prof Lucy Orta in 2015, builds on the emerging needs to provide early career artists with a space for researching on the incredibly diverse, multispecies, complex, and yet affective system of cohabitation, co-operation, and intra-action, always in movement, always in process. Today, AER provides a range of immersive experiences across 19 host organisations for postgraduate students, working across disciplines, to research and develop creative projects that interrogate concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, colonial violence, social justice, and their interconnection.
The exhibition Art for the Environment at Groundwork gallery brings together some of the AER residents whose multidisciplinary work instigate new ways of thinking and novel methods for ‘entangled’ art practices, offering new imaginative relational perspective between forms of life.’
Artists: Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes, Sophie Anna Gibbings, Nicholas Holt, Rudy Loewe, Eleni Maragaki, Beth Robertson.
Curated by Camilla Palestra with Veronica Sekules
