CLAIRE SCANLON & PAUL GRIVELL - 'la ruta nos aportó otro paso natural' 2022
August 21st - 1st September
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Our title borrowed a Spanish palindrome from a Robert McFarlane tweet, which suggests that in walking, as in life, the path may be provided by paying attention to the terrain you find yourself in. Taking this both literally and as a metaphor for creative practice, we sought to explore the relationships and tensions between what we brought with us to the making process and what exceeded us.
Situating our exploration in the geographical context of our environment, in the studio/gallery, in its location on a former USAF base, and in the wider domain of the residency's landscape, we walked and talked, drew and read, photographed and wrote, audio recorded and climbed a few fences.
Interested as we are in creative practice as a critical process, we wanted to bring secondary research into the visual and audio domain through the transcription and intersection of field recordings and readings of key texts as calligraphic and stereo soundscape components.
Other sonic dimensions in the soundscape included experimentation with image interpretation as a graphic score, the recording of 'coloured' noise (brown, pink, white), shruti and tanpura drones which accompanied our daily meditative breath/drawing practice using the looping form of a trefoil manifold, alongside recordings of ambient sounds from the Asylum spaces.
The link below takes you to a subsequent video account (or re-counting) of our 'not yet art' research process, which follows in its entirety the structure and duration of the soundscape we produced for the exhibition that concluded the residency.
The video's photography and moving image material was made using our phones, sometimes in the lowered lighting conditions of the final installation in the gallery space.
As such, this video is not simply a document of the residency outcomes, but rather another expression of the audio-visual and textual relations of the experience.