Artist Information

360°

Sound art by Richard Francis, Lovely Midget, Antony Milton, Rosy Parlane and Bruce Russell. Text by Su Ballard

In 360° the Blue Oyster Gallery is transformed into a multi-levelled installation, bringing together five sound artists and a writer (on sound), in a show about spaces and sounds and the places sounds occupy in the imagination. It is about displaced sounds, processed and reconstituted, and recontextualised in the gallery spaces. In a further step they become auditory landscapes, familiar yet unfamiliar, each shaping a distinct mood.

Each of the sound pieces uses raw material sourced from the environment. Taking a description of the Blue Oyster space as an inspiration, Richard Francis uses field recordings taken from underground spaces and sounds generated from the handling of concrete and stone objects in ’her watery eyes’. Lovely Midget’s fakerie’ uses sounds that are ‘decomposed’ and ‘disintegrated’, creating an after-image of the original in a re-ordering and re-interpretation of the source sounds.

Antony Milton’s work is primarily concerned with location and presence and in ‘A Month of Sundays’ he investigates the always different face of a familiar room. Rosy Parlane’s ‘ten guitars’ uses digitally manipulated field recordings and sample loops to form an intricate electronically-based soundscape. Bruce Russell’s ‘Tunnel Radio’ piece uses an everyday appliance (the car radio) as a sound-making device, in combination with ambient noise from the Lyttelton Road Tunnel, achieving an almost documentary allusiveness.

360° challenges the (still) commonly-held notion that art galleries are only about the visual. Here the sound becomes part of the very architecture of the gallery space. The only visual element is Su Ballard’s wall text, entitled ‘territorialisation’, from her writing on sound and noise. Noise is generally defined as ‘unwanted sound’ but it has also been called ‘sound in its purest form’, remembering that there is no such thing as silence.

The works can be heard separately but also in the in-between areas where the sounds intersect and a further layering occurs, with further contrasts and co-incidences. Each involves a layering and juxtaposition of different sonic elements, fragments brought together, displaced sounds reconstituted, aimed at changing the way we hear. The feeling of particular rooms is heightened, there are new familiarities and unfamiliarities, and something of the space is revealed.