Shadows & Echoes

I don’t know how I can tell you how wonderful it is for an artist without a studio to get to work in such a residency. Space and time to make and think…and what a place…a brick labyrinthine crypt. Just bringing a few things, and letting it all out

Quite short notice, almost the last thing of the year, just a few days – what can be done in such an artist residency?

An investigation into the nature of shadows and echoes

When I was a child I believed in shadows. I believed they copied us deliberately, and played tricks on us, the way they stretched out or hid secrets deep within them.

I listened to echoes then, the way they whispered or made the walls call back.

I always thought if I could turn around fast enough I would catch my shadow, like it was an echo of myself.

I thought that echoes never stopped, and wanted to go on listening to them as they got smaller and smaller, like watching a balloon float up into the sky, beyond where it becomes a dot, when you know you are still looking at it, only you can’t see it.

Looking, hearing, seeing, listening.

Light + dark = shadows

Sound + surface = echoes

In this short, quite last minute of the year residency, I would like to investigate shadows and echoes, to record, play and project them, to draw shadows with visitors, and to ask them questions about what they believe shadows and echoes are. I would like to get to know the echoes and shadows in the crypt – I wonder if there are special ones there? Can their nature be manipulated? Do they have secrets to divulge? Can I take one of the shadows home with me? Could I frame an echo?

Shadow: a dark area where light from a light source is blocked by an opaque object.

Echo: a sound or sounds caused by the reflection of sound waves from a surface back to the listener.

I aim to come up with better, more fitting, definitions for these mysterious, evocative, nebulous phenomena, something that conveys their poetic and imaginative potential and their subtle presence in our psyche and cultural history.