The Artist and the Sheriff (2022)
Sound, Light, Sand, Cacti, Shown as part of Continuum: The Possibilities of Time, Alongside Annea Lockwood’s Piano Drowing (1972) , Plas Bodfa, Anglesey
The walls in which we dwell hold a ‘deep sense of voicefulness’, they watch over us sternly with a mysterious air of sympathy, full of knowing as they are endlessly ‘washed by the passing waves of humanity’ (Ruskin, 1949).The Artist and The Sheriff (2022) draws upon the simultaneous invisibility and viscosity of sound, as a trigger for architectural memory and as a constructive fabric in the conception of new sonic dwellings. The exhibition Bodfa Continuum: The Possibilities of Time (2022) presented motifs of a shared past, to illustrate the malleability of time, compressed and manipulated, then staged in the architectural anatomy of the present.
Located in a reverberant tiled pantry situated above a hollow medieval well, the work weaves fragments of Plas Bodfa’s history together, using the syntax-based methodologies of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), mapping the semantic field of ‘Sheriff’ and following occurrences of Americanisms in the buildings lineage, titled in reference to the occupations of former residents Anita and George Tregarneth, a painter and the then Sheriff of Anglesey.
Inspired by the exploration of the permeable boundaries of the histories of shared space, and the escaped contents that exist between, The Artist and the Sheriff responds directly to the space in which the work is installed, not only in following a predetermined historical narrative offered by the building itself, but also in the method of onsite recording and reinstallation.
When these structures are filled with noise, the architectures breathe, and their emptiness becomes as full of potential as it devoid of the past.
Speakers placed around the room at varying intervals sound isolated notes of popular western theme songs, the sounds are augmented beyond the point of recognition, with four notes separated from the chosen tracks, played back into the pantry and individually recorded multiple times; each isolated note is then assigned a separate spatially distanced speaker. The notes facilitate a voicing of site, and aid in a plural, abstracted creation of space within space, highlighting the inaudible depth of the room.
The Artist and The Sheriff is visually curated to simulate a desert-like landscape or other-worldly non-place; much like the semantic roots of the work, these aesthetic motifs serve as navigational aids which penetrate the walls of abstracted sound. The inclusion of cacti flesh-out the proposed sonic landscape, which tease an impossible narrative; the paradox of the glowing plains of the Wild West in North Wales, serving as a visual representation of the impossibilities of voicing the past and staging it in the present.
The chosen motifs make reference to Wishart’s materialist take on the sound-object, establishing a coherent aural image of an imagined acoustic space, which is then filled with the positioned sounds, or in this case images, of their non-fictional environment. These visual elements acts as a metaphorical ‘veil’ shielding the implanted speakers, referential to Pythagorean origins of acousmatic sound.
