untitled: "amongst shells and stag beetles"
This was a long-distance collaboration with sound artist mathieu ruhlmann as part of the ANALOGUE island exhibition at Sam Weller's Gallery.
matthieu's sound piece, titled "amongst shells and stag beetles", was dubbed onto a tape cassette and mailed from his home in Vancouver. The soundscape incorporated recordings from the beach, insects, found clips, whispers, etc. The overall effect was pressurous and haunting. I built the forms while (repeatedly) listening to the tape. The resulting housings are thin-paneled wood boxes with a hidden compartment from which the sound emitted. I pressed spent espresso grinds and mollasses onto the inner face of the boxes to form the negative space of a funnel. These pressed forms had no support other than the adherent quality of the molasses and were meant to progressively fracture and collapse over time. Much of the sound felt as if it were sonically burrowing through liquid or sand, and this paralleled the tenuous pressing of the channeled forms.
