The Domestic Soundscape

Last week saw the Feedback Shed books going into the post for all the artists involved with Magic Hour. Additionally, a small group of us came together to discuss The Fantastical Reality Radio Show, making the whole week feedbacktastic.

Feedback Shed book.

Working on the book has been a real process of valuing commentary and considering the whole exchange that takes place between artists and audiences; there is so much to understand about this reciprocal relationship. I am quite pleased with how the feedback activities worked to generate comments… like this Letterpress poster, which was made from the sounds people saved in the shed.

And in holding the FRRS feedback day, I got some very positive comments about the show and now have many points from which to develop the writing I’m doing about that work. I also got some negative comments, which are incredibly, incredibly useful to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of critical engagement; to me it is so essential to get a complete picture of how work is received; even if that means hearing that the work isn’t effectively communicating what you meant it to; even if that means hearing the audience doesn’t see the point of what you are doing. Far better to know that than not; to be able to make a decision about what you are doing with a full awareness of how it will sit in terms of general opinions. On the other hand, criticism can be so destructive. I am interested in building discussions that can allow for critical engagement, without trashing the artist or undervaluing creative effort. A tricky business.

The recent discussions on Yarnstorm about comments/no comments has made me realise how central dialogue is to my own practise, and the time I have spent carefully developing a book from the comments people submitted at Magic Hour has been an opportunity to consider the whole idea of what we make, and how we talk about what we make.

Interesting to work with the feedback from Magic Hour at the same time as re-listening to the entire Fantastical Reality Radio Show. There is a huge difference in confidence between people talking about their routine objects and doings, and people talking about Art. It seems nobody wants to look stupid.

So there are a few words and a lot of ideas, but at the moment it is all rolling round in my head failing to consolidate itself into a coherent blog post. And my knitting projects are all either secret, unphotogenic, or boring. So I’ll leave you with some Feedback Shed book images, and accept that my great intentions for blogging every day in November have simply been derailed!

The map poster.

The Feedback = Fertiliser screenprinted poster.

I finished the Feedback Shed Artistbook today. More about this tomorrow, right now? Wine with my man to celebrate.

I am working on a short, 10-minute piece for OCM’s BBC Oxford broadcasts about Magic Hour and my work with sounds. It is proving harder than I thought to link the ideas – for example – the work I made for FRRS, with my role in the feedback shed.

Thankfully, it should all make sense now though, because of cabbages.

In the last episode of The Fantastical Reality Radio Show I planted the cabbage seeds that Claudia sent me and recorded the sounds of that in my sonic postcard. I found that this – along with other ideas relating creativity and the garden – largely informed all my creative decisions concerning the design of things in the Feedback Shed.

…but looking beyond myself, to the other artists whose work featured in Magic Hour, there are other Brassicas to enjoy and be inspired by. For instance, how about the amazing ‘Squeaky Cabbage Gramaphone’ by Leviathan Whispers?

Featuring wet brassica leaves, a bicycle and drill-bit turning mechanism, a clingfilm encrusted gramaphone horn and a plexiglass ‘turntable’ for playing plants, the gramaphone allowed visitors to the installation to explore the exciting, squeaky sounds afforded by the tough surfaces of brassica leaves. I got to talk with Dave and Tim Hill from Leviathan Whispers while they were preparing for day 3 of Magic Hour. I also made some recordings at home (based on the brassica gramaphone) of squeaking cabbage leaves. I will be putting these online as soon as the freakish ftp problems I am experiencing today are cleared up.

What has excited me most in developing a short, journalistic/creative review of Magic Hour, is that it has allowed me to think about the fantasy/reality axis along which all the work in the show balanced. Much of the work involved introducing a fantastical element to the gardens, such as the whispering voices in the IOU piece or the ethereal soundscapes conjured up through Robert Jarvis’s bat piece – Echo 1. But equally, these pieces relied heavily on very real and ordinary aspects of The Oxford Botanic Gardens, in order to make sense or work within the context of the site.

We generally think of imagination as being massively divorced or a departure from, ‘reality,’ but I think that Art can be used to have more complete contact with what is immediately to hand, rather than as an escape route. Many people are frustrated by contemporary art because they feel that it does not provide an adequate level of sublime or transcendental escapism. As Carol Becker writes eloquently in her essay ‘The Education of Young Artists and the Issue of Audience;’

The often unconscious expectations of a non-art world, non-visually trained audience are that art will be somewhat familiar yet also transcendent, that it will be able to catapult its viewers outside their mundane lives, provide therapeutic resolution to emotional ills, and, most significantly, that it will end in wonder.

Becker’s entire essay does a brilliant job of unpacking the complexities of the artist/audience relationship, but in the context of thinking about Magic Hour, I want to think a little bit about reality and imagination. The interesting thing is that judging from the feedback recieved in the shed, most people did experience – to some degree – a sense of wonderment or joy at the installations placed around The Oxford Botanic gardens. But for me, this wonder was not divorced from the ‘ordinary’ sonic life of the location and the work couldn’t have been made without a large degree of contact and focus with reality on the part of the artists.

For instance the IOU piece with its bells and whispering was based in part on the groups’ awareness of the Church clocks around the local area. Timing their installation in such a way that it would drop off around the hour so that the actual bells in the locale could be heard was a key decision in the way they organised the sounds within their piece and they developed a sharp awareness of the different sonic qualities of the Church bells that can be heard from the Oxford Botanic Gardens. They also noticed that the ringing of the hours is not precise or synchronised, so that the Church bells ringing comes in a kind of ad-hoc sequence.

Similarly Robert Jarvis’ piece, Echo 1, which translated the radar calls of bats down into a register audible to the human ear was highly ‘imaginative’ both in concept and in execution. The resultant soundscapes had a really ethereal quality. There is also something magical and otherworldly about the ordinarily silent calls of the bats being unusually revealed to us in this way. But the placement of bright lights along the Cherwell to attract the bats to the site and the observation of their presence in the gardens all required – again – a large deal of carefully noticing and observing reality.

To return to the brassicas, I think the gramaphone – which was superbly popular with visitors to the garden – relied totally on its creators’ levels of observation and contact with plants, to work. What things cause you to notice, say, that the leaves of a cabbage are especially durable and squeaky? What little jumps between simply noticing the material reality of a thing and doing something with that take place, mentally, amongst artists? And do those jumps represent a departure from, or a closer level of engagement with, reality?

I was asking myself this question yesterday as I chopped cabbages for our dinner. I found myself being ultra-aware of the texture of the leaves and the dragging, rubbery quality of the surfaces of the cabbage rubbing against itself. I think I am going to conclude in my piece for the radio that what made Magic Hour ‘magical,’ was the way that the artists’ close engagement with the site itself and the ordinary soundscape of the locale, revealed many of the latent and inspiring aspects of the gardens themselves.

You can hear the sqeaky cabbage interview, the squeaky cabbage and my Radio piece for BBC Oxford about Magic Hour by clicking the links below.

 

 Brassica Gramaphone artist interview: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 The sound of cabbage leaves squeaking in my kitchen: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Magic Hour piece for BBC Oxford: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On arriving back from my holidays I found myself faced with a new job. The job is amazing; it is to think up creative ways of getting feedback from people about their experiences at Magic Hour. Magic Hour is the latest exciting endeavour from Oxford Contemporary Music. I love working with Oxford Contemporary Music and the line up for this event looks absolutely fantastic.

Dubbed as ‘Sonic adventures inspired by dusk in Oxford’s beautiful Botanic Garden,’ the event promises to showcase new work made in response to and in collaboration with the Oxford Botanic Gardens from the likes of David Rothenburg (author of ‘Why do birds sing?’) and Max Eastley (whose work I have long admired). An installation featuring a handkerchief tree covered in handkerchiefs printed with giant images of pollen and the sounds of bees and traffic is also promised – which I personally can’t wait to see – along with vegetable-inspired instruments and other joy.

So I met with OCM and the Botanic Gardens last week to commence work on my feedback station. We were all agreed that a garden shed is the perfect location in which to situate fun, site-specific feedback-related activities. Now I have always considered the humble garden shed to be a bog-standard enough item, easily acquired from DIY stores, Freecycle or gardening centres. People: this is not the case. The Garden Shed is something that is easy to acquire within a 3 week timeframe but if you need one within a week, be prepared to make your acquisition some kind of epic mission. After my day yesterday of haplessly bidding on ebay and telephoning countless Garden Shed stockists and experts, Mark commented that perhaps there is a gap in the market for ‘Sheds to Go.’ I countered that in 99.9% of cases, a shed is probably a planned purchase rather than an impulse buy. But there you go: for anyone racking their brains for a new capitalist enterprise, Sheds to Go is the project for you.

At 5pm yesterday, I finally won an ebay auction, snapping up this baby for sixty of my fine English Pounds:

In a flurry of optimism I assured myself that it would be fine to drive to Hampshire and shove it in the back of my car, but a few simple measurements revealed the folly of this plan. My lovely estate car with its large dumping-ground back-seats-folded-down + roomy boot (I only got a car because transit vans don’t come with automatic gear transmission) has tonnes of room in it if what you are transporting is a few bags of clothes or some large floor cushions or all the things required to make The Fantastical Reality Radio Show come alive in Brighton. But a 6 x 4 foot shed is perhaps beyond its capacity.

It is quite a little shed and rather too red for what I have planned, but I will give it a coat of paint or stain or something on Monday and mend its broken window and then it shall be a wondrous space for housing the collection of saved sounds I hope to accrue during Magic Hour. I have ordered many of the glassine envelopes used by libraries, archivists and The Oxford Botanic Gardens themselves, for storing and indexing precious items like seeds or slides or – in this case – ideas.

I am hoping that people will ‘save’ a sound/idea/thought they had while walking around Magic Hour, and pin a copy onto the inside of the shed, which will be warmly lit and glowing. I might put some good old garden centre compost on the floor to make the space smell right. But I am hoping that by the end of Magic Hour, we will have a wonderful collection of saved sounds/ideas/thoughts, in these glassine seed envelopes.

The other idea I have is to create a map which people can tag with their own experiences, so they can tag (on the map) especially notable places to stand and be in around The Oxford Botanic Gardens while the installations are running. I found it very interesting to see what people tagged during EXPO although the tags for Magic Hour will be slightly different to the FRRS tags. I think it is vital to have a way of collecting individual peoples’ experiences at sound events, because sound installations – more than any other artform – bleed into one another and blend, mingle and intertwine imaginatively. Which means that until everything is up running, it is simply impossible to envisage how all the different pieces will work with each other. And often, unexpected sound events occur which are just as much a part of the audience’s experience as the planned events. A bird may come and sing during a particular moment. I also think sound art needs a more coherent and honest dialogue around it.

…and finally, I am working on some forms to go in a com(ments) post bin. The idea is to somehow show how essential creative feedback is for the artist and to demonstrate how awesome it is when someone takes the time to form an opinion – even a negative one – and then hands it over to nourish the thought process for the next project. So the comments box here will be a compost bin and I am going to make feedback forms which declare FEEDBACK = FERTILISER uncompromisingly across the top.

I hope these elements all eventually look like I hope they will and that my little shed-space will make sense and not be alientingly hippyish. I want it all to be in uncharacteristically earthy greens, browns and neutrals and to sit well within the lush green loveliness of the gardens themselves. I shall be there, knitting vegetables in preparation for my improvised knitted vegetable workshop, in full gardening garb including happy red wellington boots and perhaps an apron made from pea/cabbage fabric if I can stop being so precious about the fabric.

Putting this together at short notice has caused me to notice certain trends running through my work. I am fascinated by the role that tending a garden plays in my creative process and vice versa. I don’t know how many of you will remember the Manifest seed packets that we designed on the MA programme as our graduate show invitations? As a group, we designed and screenprinted seedpacket invitations and this year, I planted my seeds and put the seedpacket out into the elements to see what would become of it. Here is the seedpacket on May 5th this year and the seedlings:

And here are the seedlings and the packet now:

I am not sad that the woodlice have completely destroyed the seedpacket; it would have only been hoarded otherwise and now it has become part of the munched up soil and dust that make my garden grow so gorgeously.

I still have the poster we made on the wall inside the house and whenever I pass by it, I am reminded of the imaginative potency of the process of making Manifest. The sunflowers have been a constant reminder of that time for me.

Additionally, during the making of FRRS I was in my studio the whole time and the sounds of the garden – the blackbird, the planes, the wind in the tree, the rain on the roof etc. – all went into the show in various places. My garage studio space from which I constantly took short breaks amongst the things I’ve planted, was one of the great underlying supports for the Fantastical Reality Radio Show. It is an imaginative resource par excellence. I am currently saving seeds from my garden on the window ledge in my studio and the sunflower heads are mostly being frozen to dye yarn with.

On the last episode of the Fantastical Reality Radio Show, I planted the cabbage seeds that Claudia sent to me at the time and recorded the sound, and it occurred to me that planting something from a project is a great way of extending an imaginative process outwards into an environment and allowing it to stay alive in one’s mind. The cabbage seedlings are a constant reminder of many things FRRS and when I harvest them in the spring, I will be reminded of everything that happened around the time I planted them. I would love eventually for my creative life and my garden to become totally indivisible; for the garden to reflect all the many projects I am involved with. But maybe it already does this.

If you come along to Magic Hour and give me some honest feedback, you can get a complimentary cabbage, pea or bird button badge in thanks for your efforts! Here’s a teasing preview.

Hope to see you there… Ravelympics (I have won no medals in this, I assure you…) updates, further Pompeii and Vesuvius revelations plus Heston Blumenthal’s pizza trail of perfection will all have to wait until the other side of the Magic Hour.

The Magic Hour

Sonic adventures inspired by dusk in Oxford’s beautiful Botanic Garden

4th – 6th September 2008

7-10pm

£5 advance / £5.50 Thurs / £6 Fri / £6.50 Sat

1 under 18 free per family

* Please contact Box Office for access details