The search to interpret ‘sound’ in paint has continued and as I wrote in the last post, exploring other media has been important in this process. My focus is the garden as this is a period of remaining housebound and so it might seem that the soundscape is a limited one. However it is necessary to go beyond the obvious in this investigation into sound.
I began this series of ideas with birds as this seems obvious. I’m finding that it is necessary to start with the visual and in exploring this, new ideas come. So I began with wire drawings of birds, not in any way designed to be representational, but just letting the image emerge from the wire. The wire iteself began to twist and turn in interesting ways and began to suggest a sonic environment. I let a lot of this happen…
Interesting things began to happen from this! I wanted to get away from the visual image of the bird and so I began to work in a more abstract way, using different wires to suggest shapes and lines of sound. This is an ideal time to be recording bird sound in drawing because of the season and because the birds suddenly have the airwaves to themselves and are making the most of it. I knitted the wire to create some of the shapes and used heavier wire wrapped around objects for others. This piece emerged over a period of time of just listening. It is difficult to photograph successfully but it becomes quite beautiful when the evening sun catches parts of it.
The main challenge I find in capturing birdsound, is to avoid the obvious. Birdsound is so often expressed using ‘line’ and it is very easy to do that. But I want to explore a wider expression than the obvious and that may well mean experiments with colour.
Finally, I spent many hours just looking at the different experiments to see what they were saying…
