Slick, guest publication - Lucie McLaughlin & Jacob Calland
Description
| This project by Lucie McLaughlin and Jacob Calland takes a series of object-based field recordings of small metal sculptures of oak leaves and acorns at The Diamond in Derry as the starting point for a collaborative three-track album and accompanying pamphlet written by Lucie. The album makes use of handling noise, shifts in position, occasional overload and environmental spill from the field recordings in Derry, combined with recordings made in an ancient oak woodland in Pengelli, west Wales, where Jacob lives and works. The resulting compositions examine the shifts in tone between motionlessness metal and open woodland: where the torsion of branches mixes with ground resonances and distant water to build a spatial impression of the forest. Attending to the behaviour of sound between contained and open space, the compositions incorporate magnetically sustained piano tones, flue pipes, and a range of DIY instruments and objects recorded in the studio. The pamphlet, written at listening distance to the street sculptures, passes sites and subjects across its pages, asking what it means to inhabit a place that is always already being rewritten. Atmosphere is recorded through the quiet observations that are gathered within the grain of sentences and scenes, such as the tinny roar of the crowd from a football final on tv, an after-party that is both endless and already over, and tourists found in an open field next to a famous ruin. The pamphlet experiments with the distinctness of its language in a partial index of words that interrupts the prose frequently. The album and pamphlet share considerations for the qualities of their respective materials and grounds; sound, language, space and page. Lucie McLaughlin is an artist, writer and researcher. Through expanded forms of writing, she investigates how certain atmospheres and socio-psychological states that in themselves cannot be easily articulated, emerge through practice, where language can be made unfamiliar by a collapse in distance between the ‘ordinary’ and the imaginative. She is undertaking a collaborative PhD project with Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry and Kingston School of Art. Her work has recently been published by Muine Bheag Arts, Paper Visual Art, and Mirror Lamp Press. |