- Venue
- Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown
- Location
- Wales
The sun is shining on a beautiful April morning in Newtown and the Oriel Davies’ Gallery’s exhibition spaces are currently empty of visitors. However, all is not silent. Walk through Gallery 1 and you will begin to hear it – a soft fluttering, then a sharp, resonant twang, followed by a whirr and a whoosh. These delicate noises are coming from TestBed, Oriel Davies’ experimental space tucked away in a corner between the Resource Area and Gallery 2. The work, called Sound Books, is the result of a new collaboration between the sculptor and printmaker Amy Sterly and the video artist and musician Thom Snell.
TestBed, already a small space, has been made miniscule by a complete papering with books. Big tomes are hanging heavily from the walls with their spines spread-eagled like rude girls. Such forced openings, reminiscent of jack-in-a-box toys and concertina party decorations, are forming the pages into arcs of varying tones from white to yellow. There are two fans – one hangs from the ceiling while the other is on a stand on the ground. They are responsible for the whirring and the whooshing. The fluttering and the flapping are the pages. The sharp, resonant twang, not unlike an aboriginal instrument, is coming from a large amplifier just outside the space. And on the floor, in the right-hand corner, sits a lit, gun-metal angle-poise lamp. The smell of musty libraries is unmistakable.
Sound Books is all about associations, so much so that one wonders if it will be lost on those who cannot make them. After all, as a piece about the physicality of books it requires you to know and then remember what they feel like to hold in the hand. It’s asking you to recall the sound of pages flapping in a breeze. When did you last hear that noise? Where were you? Sitting by an open window, or outside in a garden? It is summer sound and, as this artwork implies, now an antiquated one.
Encyclopaedias make up the majority of the books. Some are dotted with tiny pen and ink illustrations, while others are pure text. There is one book full of black & white photographs of typewriters. Certain words jump out at you – animal, vicuña, movable, wave, tolerant – momentarily spinning one’s mind into a playful reverie of connections. The books are cumbersome, lumpen – the cream of their pages turned brown. The knowledge they contain is as static as they are – glued fast. What does the fluttering of their pages signify?
For all the subtle poetry of this piece there is a tension, a discomfort. The twanging sound coming from the amp that is resonating through the Gallery is like a tight cord being thrummed. How long before it snaps?
‘I’ve been here more than once to this tiny room’, an Amelia Kennedy has written in the Visitor’s Book, ‘it makes me feel safe….it is just beautiful’. Yes, symbols of the past can evoke safety. The safety of the known, the familiar, the concrete forever protected against the ruthless surge of our rapid, ever-changing Digital Age. And books, rather like tiny rooms, can give the impression that the chaos of that yet unknown change may be contained or even kept out. One goes into them, is enfolded by them and as Amelia writes, ‘it is just beautiful’.
