On the 7th of December 2017, the Studio Theatre Gallery at Leeds Arts University was host to the exhibition opening of ((RE)SOUND). The exhibition was by the initial intake of students on the newly offered Curation Practices master’s degree course to which I belong.
For us, there was a degree of being thrown in at the deep end. As students beginning our study of curation, how could we be ready at this early stage to produce a relatively high profile (within the bounds of the University) exhibition and be introduced to the University at large?
And how was it possible to get from a group of strangers within a bigger group of strangers, to a coherent and successful exhibition within a prominent arts institution?
Each student had been invited to propose a brief for the exhibition and from kernels extracted from these diverse responses, a final distillation was negotiated and circulated. The submitted work covered a variety of media, which was then judged against the brief, moving the students towards a coherent body of work. With pragmatism very much at the fore, one of the stronger proposal was not included due to space and accessibility constraints.
Once the selection had been finalised, and the shortlisted artists contacted to submit their pieces, we were able to plan for and tackle the install and promotion work. As a diverse group we were able to divide the work across specialties and chosen areas of interest. Communication key to meeting the deadline of the exhibition opening, which was quickly upon us.
From somewhere within the main space, what sounds like ageing machinery clunks and whirrs. This is Matt Parker’s W.I.T.C.H. (2015), a sound piece created from field recordings made at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, the only piece included by an artist otherwise unconnected to the university.
Paula Hickey’s intricate marblings of ink in water, Floating Traces (2017), are a response to a choral performance translated into visual works. I had come across Paula Hickey’s work when she had given a talk at the University prior to the open call going out. I found the work and the underlying process particularly fascinating and the audio, which inspired the pieces would be available for the exhibition, making a very compelling case for inclusion.
The case for W.I.T.C.H. was more subjective. I had become transfixed upon hearing the piece on the radio during the period we were selecting successful work from the submissions and it chimed with some of the narrative around white noise, which appeared in the accompanying documentation of Bex Hayne’s Untitled and Gemma Wood’s Human. As the curator that championed this piece, I justify the inclusion of Matt Parker’s work as the sound of the future (from the past) while the specific pieces it accompanies converse in a language of the present.
In proposing W.I.T.C.H. and Floating Traces, I had broken from the selection process we had agreed as a group and would have to negotiate their inclusion. It was my feeling however that these pieces would augment our exhibition.
The seascape theme present in Rachel Sedman’s Nightwatch reverberates with Simon Ellwood’s sculpture Ocean’s Echo. The sound booth, looming on the upper floor is pulled into the space in this exchange with sculpture. The diminutive obelisk has the effect of somehow chairing the discussions around the exhibition, opening up the dialogue between Hayne’s Untitled and Human and opening up the floor to the work of Hickey and Garry Barker’s asemic roadsign. There is a coherence, both in the monotone colour scheme pervading the sound and visual works.
As if representative of the visual disconnect, Ingrid Bale’s Exodus and Genesis (2017) and Joanna Wilkinson’s Untitled (2017) are segregated in a side corridor. Bale’s piece was included as it addressed the brief from a very current perspective, thus engaging with the world outside of an arts institution. However Exodus and Genesis relied on Wilkinson’s work, arguably the least coherent inclusion in the exhibition, in order to have a dialogue and therefore a voice in this exhibition. Perhaps this discussion should perhaps have taken place at a different gathering.
The conversation between the pieces started to materialise upon the install of the exhibition. Negotiated as a group, but also with the input of expertise from the University’s curatorial team, a plan was agreed for the install, which represented how the exhibition would look but could not translate the feeling of the installed exhibition and the effect it would impart.
This sudden realisation of the layers of meaning which appeared at the point of realising the exhibition have caused me to question, did the physical object stir something within my brain to establish these interwoven meanings, or did the germ of meaning originate in the process and physical act of installing ((RE)SOUND) ?
Bibliography
Crawshaw, G. Dwyer, L. Hansom, S. Hayne, B. Perriman, W. (2017) ((RE))SOUND), [Exhibition], Leeds Arts University, Leeds, 7 November
Curating Questions 