Mother Shipton's Prophecy

I am drawn to deceptively simple materials, physical and sonic: the sound of two stones scraped slowly across one another; the reverberant impact of these stones struck hard together in a resonant concrete building; the change that results if a person walks slowly around that building while striking the stones together; the memory of pulling these stones out of a river on a trip twelve years in the past. The act of finding these materials, their resonances, and their arrangement in time and space, makes them incredibly personal, and they become talismans marking specific times and places in my life.

My work attempts to use ideas from these materials in activating resonances, physical and imaginary, of their surroundings. I am reminded of the effect achieved by the artist Dan Flavin, in which a small number of green fluorescent light tubes, for example, illuminate a darkened, enclosed concrete environment. Shadows and reflections highlight the surrounding walls, or generate illusions of larger or smaller spaces, and participants experience shadows and afterimages in complementary rose colors when closing their eyes or turning away from the lights.

I am after an analogous aural, visual, and memory response, where a participant in one location in place and time experiences an afterimage of another. Indoors and out, my work introduces sound and image alongside that of the natural environment and its human interlopers, offering participants an opportunity to be present inside the work, and the ability to create their own senses of local time as they pass through and encounter it. Observers engage the physical reality of the environment, as well as a larger imagined, possibly apocryphal, topography and conjectured history of a site built from their observations.