Site-specific
I’ve worked collaboratively on a number of installations bringing audio into public spaces - from a beach hut in St Leonard’s-on-Sea to an audio cinema built in the Barbican’s foyers in London.
A sound art duet created by me and Alan Hall for the elevators in SFMoma.
Produced by Falling Tree in association with the Third Coast International Audio Festival.
Co-created with Nina Garthwaite from In The Dark and Siddharth Khajuria at the Barbican, the Soundhouse was a cinema for audio built in the Barbican’s foyers.
The space - filled with hanging cocoon chairs and dim lighting - played a continuous loop of curated audio, as well as hosting a series of events designed to explore the physicality of the listening experience. Across the course of a month in 2018, the Soundhouse featured an installation around dreaming from The Heart, a premiere from the Stance podcast, events based around masks and meditation, an evening of dancing to spoken word radio and an open space event (in collaboration with Strange and Charmed), which asked ‘how can we make our audio community better?’
The installation also had an accompanying book which featured essays from Edwin Brys, Cathy FitzGerald, Renay Richardson, Farokh Soltani and Jon Tjhia, as well as original illustrated postcards from Nina.
It wouldn’t have existed without the inspiration of years of experimental audio events produced by Nina and In The Dark - from swinging chairs in forests to broadcasts on a Lightship.
It was designed to provoke conversations around audio and its absence from public space - what does it mean that audio as an artform doesn’t have the equivalent of a cinema, a concert hall or a gallery? Does it render invisible who’s making the work and the value of their labour? Impact our media literacy? Or shift our sense of the value of radio itself?
The front of the Soundhouse installation was designed by Moon Hussain.
The second (digital) iteration of the Soundhouse was co-created with Nina Garthwaite from In The Dark, Razia Jordan and Siddharth Khajuria from the Barbican. It ran from 28th October 2020 until 28th February 2021.
In this edition, we handed over curation to three audio artists - Arlie Adlington, Axel Kacoutié and Ariana Martinez - who all created themed audio loops which were broadcast through an online radio player. Designed to recreate the feeling of radio’s ‘liveness’, these loops allowed you to have a simultaneous experience with anyone else who happened to be visiting the website at that time.
I created the audio transcripts for each of the rooms and - inspired by the work of Christine Sun Kim, Raymond Antrobus and Constellations’ Flip the Transcript workshop - I attempted to present subjective descriptions of the sound and music. Trying wherever possible, to use tactile or visual imagery, as opposed to sonic language to translate this audio into text.
Soundhouse: Intimacy and Distance also featured specially commissioned writing from Raymond Antrobus, Sandhya Dirks, Dr Jess Hayton and Sayre Quevedo, as well as an introductory essay from me and Nina.
All of the collages and animations where created by Nina.
At the first XMTR festival in 2024, Field Recordings occupied a beach hut by a stormy sea playing out a slow weave of sounds recorded between 2020 and 2024.
Accompanied by specially-handmade accordion fold zines, listeners heard some of the sounds that have caught the attention of audio-makers from around the world over the past four years.