Rainforest, 2021 🔊🔊
Electromagnetic frequency receiver, tripod, sound-system, cabling.
Rainforest uses a kind of circuit bent commercial EMF receiver to reveal an invisible landscape of electromagnetic waves, which are generated by everything from live electronics and transmitters (power cables, Wi-Fi beacons, radio waves etc) and (to some degree) even living things. The receiver picks up the waves that zoom through the air and transmits them as a sound signal.
The title Rainforest draws similarities between the technological EMF environment and natural rainforest ambience. I wanted to resound the liveliness and interactivity within and between large systems, that often goes unheard and unseen, particularly within the digital. Aside from the title, there is nothing depictive: the focus is on the revealing of the invisible, yet vastly complex landscapes that we *physically* live within as much as the real world. The virtual effects the real homies!
Summer 2021
(1) Strata, 2021
Charred and reformed ply, G-clamps
Strata is a series of sculptures I’ve been working on during my research into ecologies and deep-time, looking at how environments are affected by both organic and artificial action. Analysing the processes of layering and erosion that form rock faces can help us “read” these ecologies and deep histories.
I built the sculptures by repetitively layering, slicing, burning and reforming a specific spruce ply, which has unique qualities due to its chemical composition; as this spruce is grown particularly quickly it pulls up more silica from the soil, leaving it more susceptible to charring at lower temperatures. By bending and manipulating the saw to create friction during the cutting process, the wood is eroded and burnt, leaving a series of lines that form a pattern. The two wooden structures are freestanding in G-clamps, drawing attention to the processes that formed both this sculpture and the rock faces that initially inspired it.
(2), (3) Installation Video, A/V Spectrogram
During installation, the work features a sonic element generated by inputting the burn patterns through an A/V spectrogram, furthering the breadth of process from nature to artifice, and expanding the sculpture into its environment. Using the material to the absolute opposite of their intended structural function, the works themselves are highly susceptible to changes in humidity and temperature - like the landscapes they were inspired by, they are never constant and never in isolation.
In Transit, 2021
Hand Engraved York Stone, Plastic, Stainless Steel Trolley
(1) This sculpture proposes a deep-time of fictions and parallel histories. Freshly brushed and stacked on a stainless-steel trolley, they appear as freshly dug samples, caught in transit between a dig-site and the laboratory.
(2) The primary artefact from In Transit, Petroglyph I is an aged York stone engraved with a form developed from earlier experiments with creating ‘anorganic’ artefacts. Marking the stones gives them an archetypal power, for example that explored in prehistoric ritual; despite the allusion towards dynamic flight, the subject is “encased” in stone like a fossil.
(3, 4) Each stone hosts a unique patina and micro-biome, directly traceable back to the wetlands from where they originate.
The plastic encases the petroglyph like a cell membrane; however, it is impermeable and sterile, cutting it off from the environment. The plastic makes the temporal origin of the artefact uncertain.
