Between Air clay and Woods of Certain Flutes
** Disclaimer: all artwork installation and display was in accordance with COVID-19 guidelines for safety.
Despite the Norman Rea Gallery being closed to the public, the gallery was open to privately install an immersive exhibition. The gallery worked directly with a team of talented artists - a collaboration between Carmen Troncoso (recorder performer) and Richard Kearns (audiovisual artist). The installation “Between Air, Clay and Woods of certain flutes,” is an immersive, audiovisual, interactive experience assembled in our space. The content of the installation and the space needed to adapt to these uncertain and vulnerable Covid 19 times. The gallery space as most of us know it - brightly lit, filled with music - is transformed into unfamiliar and exciting territory through music and a series of projections; installation included purchasing black-out curtains, and Japanese hand made paper. Beautifully done, the piece manages to transform a 1960s brutalist gallery into a forest-scape.
About the Artists
Carmen continually develops interdisciplinary artistic projects that highlight the current diversity of flutes, from the ancient to the most recent. Her research combines the study of the different recorder models and their origins, evolution, use and associated contexts, with performance and creation, along with issues of identity and perception. This installation is Carmen’s artistic outcome as a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of York.
Richard Kearns is an Environmental designer, audiovisual artist who creates open-ended artworks which facilitate embodied encounters that blend the physical, psychological and somatic to explore social participation in those that engage with them. During his doctoral research in Interactive Media at the University of York, he identified fundamental factors of engagement within interactive immersive media environments and explained how they operated.
The Installation
Characterised by sound, this installation creates an immersive audio-visual dream-space that reunites the musical instrument of the recorder with forest as a transformed inhabitant. The audio-visual pieces projected have all been created for this installation, in a collaborative work between composers and recorder-performer Carmen. While moving through space, one experiences a multi-faceted reality that oscillates in relation to position within the environment, with time and with fluctuations between image and sound. Almost eerily otherworldly, the visitor is transported - able to find their own connections to, and between, nature, material, object and sound.
The experience begins with the visitor situated in a variety of woods from different locations – the valuable and living wood; and in ancient civilisations, who crafted the earth, the clay, turning it into sounding objects; and also in air, as nature’s blowing entity, and in the hands of makers – those transforming magicians, intermediaries between nature and Musicians. Projected video footage connects the range and scope of time and materials, projecting them onto translucent material (through paper and veil). In addition to visual projections, the sounds of three videos – of forests, recorder-making, and images related to ancient flute culture – are combined with two specially-commissioned electroacoustic compositions: there exists a constantly shifting dialogue between sound and merging images while the visitor navigates through the space. Much like a natural forest, navigation is guided by light and noise, with one's sense of direction thrown off by the immersive nature of the space.
Huerquehue National Park is located in the Andes Mountains, in the Araucanía Region of Chile, close to Lake Caburga. This place was designated as a National Park in 1967 according to the Convention for the Protection of the Flora, Fauna and Natural Scenic Beauties of America “Washington Convention”.“Huerquehue” means “place of messengers”. Video footage by architect Jaime Inostroza, Chile.
History behind the project, by Carmen Troncoso
“During my PhD, I explored the creative potential afforded by the enormous number of recorder models currently available. I broadened this spectrum by also incorporating additional flutes that musicologists think likely to be related to the recorder’s evolution: whistles and double flutes. The fact of being a Chilean performing an instrument that belongs to European culture – although rooted in daily practice and personal artistic expression over many years – has always triggered in me a need to connect my being from South America with my adopted European musical tradition. In the music I play and co-create, I usually evoke sonorities of South American wind instruments. Since 2018, I have been studying Pre-Columbian flutes, their sound possibilities, designs, and making processes. Particularly, I am focusing on the systematisation and creation of new works for a Mayan ceramic triple flute by Argentinian anthropologist and researcher Esteban Valdivia, who studies and makes flutes and sound objects of ancient American cultures.
The different materials, technologies, sounds, aesthetics, and cultural connotations of all these contrasting instruments are embedded with information, histories and stories, all offering musical affordances. It all starts in a variety of woods from different locations – the valuable and living wood; and in the ancient civilisations, who crafted the earth, the clay, turning it into sounding objects; and also in air, as nature’s blowing entity; and in the hands of the makers – those transforming magicians, intermediaries between nature and musicians. In my artistic projects, I have explored ways of dealing creatively with my instruments, perceiving them not as mere tools but rather as independent entities, actors (actants), artefacts, even creatures. This broadened perception of the instruments’ history, agency and affordances triggered the necessity to reveal their expanded expressivity in both visual and sonic dimensions through the creative development of an installation.
The project draws on a range of disciplines and therefore I have established collaborations with a number of professionals. I feel very grateful to have been able to assemble this project in the Norman Rea Gallery, despite the current restrictive COVID-19 circumstances.” The project has been granted funding by Ibermusica for the creation of a virtual version, to be released in September 2021 alongside a soundtrack - including two electroacoustic pieces and new works for a Maya Triple Flute.
The exhibition brought something special to the gallery, unlike anything we had ever hosted before, and the experience - for us as a gallery - has stood as a testament to the resilience of artists.
Despite only a few visitors being able to experience the installation, they left positive testimonies of their experience:
“I really liked the atmosphere, and it was like you were going back in time”
“The merging of recorders and forests is astonishing, an illusion you don’t want to stop”
“A dream-like experience”
“Interesting dialogue between nature and craft processes”
“The soundtrack just captured all my senses”
“I would live in here”
“Mesmerizing”
“It reminds me of my homeland”
(*Reviews from the Visitor’s Section)
Miniature forest with recorder holograms by creative practitioner Carlos Zamora, Uk.