This commission from the ICA for the exhibition ‘Soundworks’ gave me the chance to return back to sound, use it as a pure medium; a chance to adapt my current video practices. Recent video work has been embracing the natural organic repetitious beauty of the impressionist movement, examining video as textural expressive medium. With this sound piece I wanted to embrace a practice which was prevalent during the late 19th century, the field study, going out on a daily basis, to the same area, studying the surroundings.

The piece consists of seven one minute vignettes, all from 7x seven-minute recordings made over a single week in March, along a river in the Essex countryside. Starting on Monday 26th March at exactly 9:00am, finishing at 15:07 on the Sunday. Each of the seven minute recordings were condensed into one, layering each minute on top of each other.

Within Bruce Naumen’s ‘Days’ through words he jumps from Tuesday to Sunday with ease, within my video work I’m constantly changing speed settings also with ease; both manipulate the passage of time like a meandering river.

Thank-you to Kath Woods at first site for nominating me for this commission.

ICA Soundworks

Over one hundred sound works were produced by artists from all over the world. Selected by our curators and art institutions worldwide, the artists were invited to submit a sound work, taking its stimulus from themes evoked in Bruce Nauman’s Days, presented concurrently in the Lower Gallery as part of our season on sound.