Anonymous Words 2007

My collaboration with the composer Lawrence Ball is an attempt to recreate a meeting between image and sound-words. The sound was based on Lawrence’s voice reading words at random and then using this material to create music. The mantras, became sound vibrations beyond meaning. When utterance does away with interpretation pure sound can be seen as oral scripture or image. It is said that the original ancestral indo-european language reflected a fundamental unity of origin between image and word. Only later did people invent different images for the word resulting in the replacement of the original marks. 'Anonymous Words' calls for a communicative experience without translation, a story without recognizable meaning.

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Image of Sound 2008

Following the success of Anonymous Words, my second collaboration with composer Lawrence Ball integrates vision and sound as a single experience. The projected sound graphics show a unique original insight into a composer's way of working. The sound experience is a sequence of 7 pieces repeating every 74 minutes. The music starts from the aboriginal sound of two iron bark sticks (believed to be the hardest wood, like metal) struck together by Linda Muddiman-Rose and developed by Lawrence into various motifs. The background projections show diagrams drawn by Lawrence to mark sound shapes. The work was curated and photographed by Zsuzsanna Ardo.

Watch film of Image of Sound installation

The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist’s problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea – complex that makes contact with mystery – of life, of men, of nature, of the hard black chaos that is death. Or the greyer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.

Barnett Newman