My first visits to Broomhill date back to childhood holidays in the 1970s, long before Rinus & Aniet van de Sande's inspired ownership & renovation. In recent years, I have revisited many times & shown work there in several exhibitions. But now I wanted to do something in direct response to Broomhill itself, and specifically to the large collection of contemporary sculpture which occupies the extensive garden and woodland trail.
From the exhibition blurb:
"Over the past eight years or so, I have seen the sculpture garden develop and change throughout the seasons. For me the sculptures, whether figurative or not, have a kind of living presence, one which I imagine to assimilate their surroundings and experiences as a secret knowledge which I shall attempt to reveal.
I have attached contact microphones to several of the metal sculptures, which “listen” though their resonant interaction with the ambient soundscape. Each sculpture brings its own unique colouration and distortion to the sound which is brought back to the exhibition space.
Each day I shall be relaying the live sounds of the garden and mixing them with recordings from previous days, so creating an amalgam of layered sound which will become more intense as the week progresses.
This venture is entirely experimental in that I really don't know how the evolving sound collage will work out - or even if it will work at all! Whatever happens, I shall have many hours of sound recordings: raw materials to work on over the winter months."
Luckily, something did happen! The exhibition was a success, and people were fascinated by the translocation of sounds from just a few hundred metres away, even though we are all familiar with sound and video beamed across the globe in real time. After an intense editing session back home, the following sound collages emerged.
sound & silence in the listening garden
sound
Here's a condensed version of a 50 minute montage, in which 2 sculptures gather all of the sounds over a whole day, from midnight to midnight. Beginning with a mix of 40 tracks, the sound slowly builds until 2000 tracks are layered together. Rain, wind and virtuoso singing, it's all here!
silence
Part of a 24 minute montage which sequences the quietest second in each minute of the day. The clock tick marks the seconds. This 3 minute section covers the hours 5-8am.
Background - the original concept
Having decided to incorporate elements from the garden itself into some kind of installation, I visited Broomhill in September 2010, with the specific aim of gathering materials and making notes. On returning home I sketched out the concept for a proposed installation:
These ideas culminated in a sound installation a year later in October 2011, as part of a joint exhibition "About the Land", with fellow artists Brenda Jet & Claire Winfield.
installing
The Broomhill sculpture garden is situated on a steep terraced hillside & I had to get the microphone signals a few hundred metres back up to the gallery to provide a real-time feed for recording & mixing.
So I bought 300m of cheap 4pair Cat5 network cable & made up some little balanced microphone amplifiers to boost the signal close to each sculpture. Everything had to be fully waterproof, of course, as the cables were festooned across the gardens and woodland, which involved much clambering through undergrowth. Once connected up, the whole thing was powered with 48V from my mixing desk & worked well - no hum! Miraculously, no little critters chewed through the thin cables during the course of the week either!
(you just can't get the staff these days!)
listening
(hollow stainless steel)
The microphone adds a poignant twist.
At any one time I had a maximum of 4 microphones connected back to the desk. I mixed these down to 2 channels for an almost continuous recording over 7 days. Each morning I copied the previous day's recordings to my laptop so that I had a continuously growing bank of material for random selection. At this point I was replaying up to 16 recordings simultaneously to build up a montage with a live-feed mixed in.
After a couple of days I extended the cable down to the lake to listen in to more of the resonant metal sculptures.
(Photos below date from september 2010)
"Sail" is hugely resonant and almost invites people to tap against it as they pass by. I mounted the microphone low down at the back & hid the cable in the undergrowth.
When listening to "Tree", each stainless steel tubular branch has a different resonant frequency and, because they're all bolted together, it was possible to hear this in the rain. My microphone was at the bottom of the longest branch. (Or is that the trunk?)
the sound (& silence)
I found that, by layering as many tracks as possible, my original concept was coming together: a dense chatter of wind & rain effects, birdsong, traffic, wildlife & human sound: everything that the sculptures were exposed to. In fact my biggest concern, that individual sounds would be swamped by a mass of indeterminate noise, was completely unfounded: the loud sounds always cut through.
By the end of the week I had amassed over 172 hours of recorded sound, of which only a tiny amount had been played back in the gallery mix.
On returning home, I decided to approach the editing task with a tightly defined process which would prevent me from having to make aesthetic judgements on the value of any particular sound event. Eliminating my own value system from the selection process allows the listener to hear through the sculptures' ears, not mine; thus adhering to the original concept.
I decided to compile two distinct forms of montage: all of the "sound" & all of the "silence" in a given time period: the extremes. Hence the work's title: "Sound & silence in the listening garden".
The "sound" montage was simply a layering process in which every minute of the day's sound was interleaved and stacked in a continuous loop to provide a track density from 40 to 2000 layers.
But what is "silence"? Outside the laboratory it's a relative term. John Cage wrote a treatise on it & created his own work 4'33", listening to a performance of which isn't a particularly silent experience in most situations. And therein lies the generally accepted definition. "Silence is what you have left when nothing much else is happening". Such is the case in the listening garden, the silence here corresponds to the quietest second from each minute of the day. Some silences are quieter than others & they say quite a lot about place, too.
Happy listening!