Exhibitions
Soft Night Falling
Wendy Mansell
The idea of a sound signature that is sourced from its environment and links us back to that place has been explored in various forms by composers, architects and artists. Late Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura composed his work Four Postcards: The Form of Sounds Born and Returned to the Landscape based on the sound signature of two museum sites in Eastern Japan, for the opening of a new seaside site of the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in Hayama (2003). Listening now to the recording, I am transported back to Hayama where I spent three months with my family last year. Many of the sounds that recall the time of day when light faded in this small seaside town were man-made: the tune that played from town hall at 5pm and the call of the roasted sweet potato truck that we initially mistook as a call to prayer. In the case of Yoshimura's sound signature, however, it was recordings of the sound of waves and wind at the museum site prior to the beginning of construction that formed the basis of his composition.
Soft Night Falling is a collaboration between three artists: Lilla Watson, Timothy O'Dwyer and Carl Warner. Their responses trace the layers of sound and silence, light and shadow that play upon each other at Dammerung, the transitional time when it is neither day nor night.
Watson's works on paper form the foundation of this installation. With scorch marks trailing and the scent of fire lingering, she has burned holes through a top layer of paper giving entrance to the underlying layers of colour. Recalling her maternal grandmother's Gangulu country in Central Queensland, Watson's work is a rumination on the sights and sounds of nature, as 'the last vestiges of daylight are engulfed by the shadows of darkness ... the coming of night, descending as a soft, dark blanket ... [the marks] contain the song cycles of the night-time creatures, and their sounds and movement; the song of trees and grasses and the brush of wings in the night.'
Recently musician/composer Timothy O'Dwyer visited Gangulu country, where he recorded sounds from nature over the course of two nights. He then took the sound signature of the bush back to the studio in Singapore, where he is now based. The composition is an arrangement of 'field recordings' from the bush and surrounding countryside of the Dawson River, made during his visit to Central Queensland, providing an aural link to the site and adding another sensory layer to the installation
The idea of layering is explored in each artist's contribution to the work. Lilla Watson begins the process quite literally through the multiple layers of paper in each wall work, continuing with the scent of fire eliciting another sensory response that recalls the smell of the bush. O'Dwyer adds layers of sound, sourced from recordings taken at dusk. A third layer has been introduced through a video element, shot by Brisbane artist Carl Warner. The video is simply an image of Watson's works on paper, projected directly onto the actual works. The projected video produces a shimmering effect, calling to mind changes in light as evening falls.
Inasmuch as the collaboration is grounded solidly in a specific locale, taking its visual reference points and the concrete material of the sound from the bush, there is always an element of unpredictability in how it will all work when the elements are brought back together in the gallery.
Perhaps it is that element of unpredictability that makes collaboration such an interesting process for artists, and audiences as well. I came to understand this process best through a recording project that I did about ten years ago with my partner. We set out to do a recording of a Kurt Weill song, Speak Low, and accompanied by a pianist, I started laying the first few tracks of vocals. I seemed cursed to hit every note in exactly the same way, time after time; I grew very frustrated with my inability to escape from years of classical training. My partner, a self-taught bassist, fell silent, despite my urging him to just 'jump in'. For a moment it seemed that the idea of recording something together was ill-conceived, but finally he put the headphones on and proceeded to lay down a track of talking and tapping away at a digital sample of a vintage typewriter. I was thrilled with how he was so free of the same conventions that bound me to repeat the same performance over and over again. Later he admitted that he had turned off the playback: his performance was in response to the rise and fall of the lights on the mixing board ... It may not have been what I had in mind, but ultimately added a whole other dimension to the project that neither of us had imagined.
In the case of Soft Night Falling, the visual and aural means of interpreting and recreating the experience of nature's evensong in the Central Queensland bush work together to build an environment within the gallery, giving audiences multiple points of entry to experience the poetic ideas underpinning the project. While the exact nature of the final work can not be known until all the elements are merged in the gallery space, the process of collaboration and working through the same idea with different approaches is in itself a journey worth taking.