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 has been curated by the initial intake of students on the newly offered Curation Practices master’s degree course to which I belong. Ten works have been selected, covering a range of media and originating almost exclusively from across the University’s different courses.
The exhibition appears designed as an introduction, for the bright eyed, new MA students to the University (and each other); and to announce the course to the University as a whole. 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?
So 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?
Amongst the project management tasks, key curatorial questions needed to be answered, or were perhaps guided by circumstance. Givens, such as being new to the university and taking our first steps in the field of curation, meant that we did not have an extensive network of students. The time pressures around the need to have works available for the exhibition, would lead to the decision to circulate an open call only to University staff and students (with two exceptions discussed below).
Each student was 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 then had to be judged against the brief as well as fitting into a coherent body of work. Practical considerations also had to be considered, reject the most professional looking submission
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, with communication key to the success of 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 in turn seems to elicit a response from the vending machines in the corner (a fixed feature of the space rather than an exhibit), which whirr and hum in reply. This is Matt Parker’s W.I.T.C.H. (2015), a sound piece created from field recordings of the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell, made at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and the only piece included by an artist otherwise unconnected to the university.
The audio is primarily layered over the work of Bex Hayne (Untitled, 2017) and Gemma Wood (Human, 2017), two prints locked in close conversation. Both are monochrome prints and both reflect physical responses to the sound of the contemporary world.
Paula Hickey’s beautiful and delicate marbling of inks in water, Floating Traces (2017), are a response to a choral performance translated into visual works. As alumna of the University’s MA in Creative Practice (again selected and put forward to the exhibition by me), I was required to justify the inclusion of the work to my peers, negotiating successfully with a majority.
In putting forwards W.I.T.C.H. and Floating Traces, I had broken from the means we had agreed as a group so understandably there was some hesitation around including these pieces. It was my feeling however that these pieces would augment our exhibition. I had come across Paula Hickey’s work when she had given a talk at the University prior to the open call being circulated, 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. Also, as a very recent alumna of the University, timing seemed to be a very cruel reason to exclude the pieces.
The case for W.I.T.C.H. was much more subjective, I had become transfixed upon hearing the piece on the radio. This occurred in 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 Hayne’s Untitled and 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.
Chance would present only one sound-only piece submitted through the open call, Rachel Sedman’s Nightwatch (2017) answered the brief, the artists voice whispering in the hushed tones enforced upon her while talking around her sleeping children at night. Speaking to the themes of language, place and time, this piece made practical decisions around what to include in the single available soundbooth very simple, although this should in no way detract from how well the piece worked in the ‘enclosure’ of a soundbooth with the sound washing up the insides of the space, as if filling and up and warming a bath.
The aqueous theme present in Nightwatch reverberates with Simon Ellwood’s sculpture Ocean’s Echo. The soundbooth which looms over the main space is pulled into the space in this exchange with sculpture, which has the affect of somehow chairing the discussions around the space. Both Hayne’s Untitled, breaking off from it’s dialogue with Human and opening up the floor to the work of Hickey and Garry Barker’s asemic roadsign. There is a feeling of space, but also coherence, both in the monotone colour-scheme that pervades the sounds as well as the visual works.
As if representative of the disconnect visually, Ingrid Bale’s Exodus and Genesis (2017) and Joanna Wilkinson’s Untitled (2017) are segregated in a side corridor. Bale’s piece was included on the grounds of approaching key themes in the brief from a very current perspective which is relevant beyond the walls of an arts institution. Exodus and Genesis needed Wilkinson’s work, which was arguably the least coherent inclusion in the exhibition, in order to have a dialogue and thus a voice in this exhibition. Perhaps this discussion should perhaps have taken place at a different gathering.
The conversation between the pieces started to feel material 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 upon 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 