Auditorium (2023)
Made for Borrow Pit Exhibition, with the Yorkshire Sculptors Group 2023 at Huddersfield Art Gallery.
12th April - 3rd June 

media: Feonic speakers, sound, drawings, perspex museum mounts.
dimensions: variable.

The work takes as its starting point the imagined futures of civic centre redevelopment: designed green vistas, monolithic built structures and phantom pedestrians. The unseen movement and displacement of raw materials haunt these visualisations.

Field recordings from the precarious vicinity of the art gallery were gathered to produce a sonic archive of a space in transition. A choir singing a glissando added the human voice. This audio material was manipulated and orchestrated into a soundtrack played back through Feonic surface speakers, fixed directly to the glass of the gallery window. The smart material technology in these speakers (which emits micro vibrations) effectively transforms the window itself into a glass speaker, making the soundtrack audible inside the gallery and outside in the piazza. The series of small drawings and postcards inside the gallery (in a vitrine) depict both lived spaces and visualisations of spaces to come, their surfaces encrusted with crystals that continued to grow and change during the run of the exhibition.

"The title Borrow Pit refers to a building term which means a hole, pit or excavation site that is dug to remove materials to be used in a construction project and acts as a response to the gallery's location and a site about to undergo major urban redevelopment. Much as Borrow Pit might signify the reclamation or re-purposing of materials for new development, the work shown also explored and questioned themes relating to transformation or renewal. In our proposal, the Yorkshire Sculptor Group, who have a diverse range of sculpture-based practices, responded to ideas of reconstruction, regeneration, and repurposing in a variety of processes and materials to examine site as a place of change."