This exhibition is curated by my Phd students: Briony Hughes, Caroline Harris and Gareth Hughes in collaboration with the Culture Team at Royal Holloway. It features work from artists and writers working with text and image in relation to ecological and environmental issues. It reflects the cultural environment and work of the practice-based students that I teach at MA and Phd level on the Poetic Practice pathway and some of the work by contemporaries that we admire, including: Susan Johanknecht and Kate Meynell and JR Carpenter. Really delighted to be showing some of my work from the Plume of the Volants series in this company.
This exhibition is open from 17 January 2024 – 24 March 2024 in the Davison Building Exhibition Space at Royal Holloway.
“Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length” John Cage
“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence” Middlemarch, George Eliot.
The naming of clouds proves a starting point. In possibility we name the shapes as if to produce an inventory of natural phenomenon of the unnoticed or forgotten. A change in climate affects the dew point. An increase in humidity magnifying the effects of heat waves. A body unable to cool.
Noise of silence as music is not a new approach. Thunder sheet. A roar on the other of silence. Go back into the things dismissed as noise with new parameters of attention, make new sense of the data. Parameters set while agreeing that it cannot know how to in advance of itself. A process of unfolding.
Distinctions between central and peripheral tone are eroded or bagged out into new stories. This is not about the expansion of everyday sounds into music but concerns the attention and tuning of location to the everyday.
Once the containers and containment of measurement are exhumed we find ourselves in the frame as prime enemies of climate justice and more. Facts picked up in the data with the question of what is noticed, how and for what purpose?
