AUDIOVISUAL WORKS
Aurora (2020)
Aurora is an audiovisual work that explores the influence of subjectivity over an experience of a natural phenomenon such as the Aurora Borealis, and the inextricable nature of personal emotions from any external experience such as this.
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The work combines visuals created by injecting ink into water to imitate the colourful, rippling effects of the Aurora Borealis, and audio formed entirely from manipulations of vocal recordings from me and the person with whom I saw the lights, each describing our personal experience of the event to highlight how different perspectives shape an experience. The heavy processing of the voices which renders the spoken accounts of events mostly incomprehensible echoes the disintegration of coherent memory into key feelings that comes with time and many retellings of an event.
Portals (2020)
Portals was composed during, and in response to, the lockdown that came into force in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is an exploration of the capability of sound to transport one to different virtual spaces when physical movement between different spaces is forbidden.
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Portals exists in two forms - both as a 4-movement acousmatic work, and as a 5-movement site-specific audiovisual installation that combines the acousmatic elements with live improvisation.
The piece is split into 5 movements, each representing a different place that I have lived in the past. In the first four movements of the piece, each musical “space” is made up of an acousmatic patchwork of sounds from the place in question – the voices of the people I lived with, everyday sounds that surrounded me, and samples of pieces that I wrote while in that space – and a live performer (me), playing improvised material on the violin, responding to and trying to project myself into each of these virtual, imagined spaces, and create a connection and dialogue between my current experience and my past environments. The text spoken by the voices of the people living in each space are taken from texts that were important to me at the point when I occupied the space in question.
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The fifth movement of the piece is unlike the others, as it presents the space that I have occupied during lockdown – my flat in Glasgow. As this final movement begins, my sole presence “on stage” is joined by another figure – my flatmate with whom I spent lockdown. In this final movement, the imagined, acousmatic virtual space disappears as the real space grows to include another, real presence with whom I can interact gesturally, as the two of us improvise and respond to one another.
The installation explores ideas of place, as the single live player tries to connect their gestural space (body and instrument) with the virtual space created within each recorded patchwork soundworld. In this way, it is a sort of duet between two distinct but interacting spaces. The piece also explores autoethnographic themes, reflecting my own experience of home at different points throughout my life, in relation to the current societal experience of lockdown. Because this piece was written within the context of lockdown, even the soundscapes of the past are influenced by feelings of repetitiousness and discomfort. The piece hence ends up posing the hypothetical idea of what my lockdown experience would have been like if Covid-19 had happened during the period when I lived in each of the 5 places I have lived throughout my life.