Air, Magnetic Force Field (European Space Agency), piano wire, Steel, glass, microphones, projector, mirror, speakers, wires, silver, diamond.
Earthwise invites a place of meetings and relations, without limit or system. A focus on the ‘and’ and not the ‘therefore … ‘ is driven by the gathering forces of ecological, social and psychological crises that pose an inescapable reality for artists today.
The term ‘Earthwise’ is inspired by Donna Haraway and her incitement to ‘earthwide’ situated and relational forms of knowledge. Haraway’s word is mutated to orient away from the vertical towards the horizontal, away from the separated stance of the eye/mind towards the uncertain discoveries of planetary processes and corporeal practices.
Earthwise implies
A reorientation from the human Listening not imposing Enlivenment Questioning vertical hierarchies Working with technology not under it Situatedness and solidarity networks Owing not owning Reciprocity Creating commons Intergenerational thinking “Other planes of there”
The publications and exhibition have been composed through the interactions of five PhD seminar groups (Curatorial Thinking, Material Engagements, Entanglement, Planet, Out in the OPEN) at the Royal College of Art’s School of Arts and Humanities. In the spirit of Earthwise, the publication and exhibition have been generated through processes of exchange, action, making, discussing, studying, and responding, to produce creative work that is enactive and environmentally sensitive.
Through this work we have raised questions about the connections between aesthetic practices and climate breakdown. More specifically what role the arts, expression and the imagination may play in becoming sensitive to and even finding routes out of catastrophe.
We are interested in the necessity of confronting the darkness of our times, while holding onto the hopeful forces that affirm and renew creativity and therefore life.
close up of a renewed commitment to life and decay, always – Piano wire, piano, foamboard, sensors. Close up of sound sculpture installation
Shirley Renwick creator and Liam Dougherty creator
A collaboration between composer and sculptor.
This installation explores the hidden resonances of the air, by using strings and technology.
a renewed commitment to life and decay, always is a participatory audio-visual installation.
Among the first harpsicord and mandolin treasures, visitors are confronted with a 100 year old upright piano that has been stripped down, baring its essential components in the soundboard and strings. It is attached to a sculptural instrument searching in the air, its piano wire antenna reaching beyond its confines. Any sound in the air will cause the piano wires to resonate, and this energy is captured by microphone and diffused throughout the space through multiple layers of technologies.
This installation explores the hidden resonances of the instrument and the air, by using strings and technology to translate the potential sound vibrations into a visual and sonic force not usually experienced at the forefront of human perception.
This sensitive sound art was accompanied by a sound activated light projection following the movement of 360 points in space as vibrations and feedback in the air, picked up by the piano wire instrument, were amplified into the room. (see below)
“I have been working with 3 core ingredients in 2022: air, sound and technology.
This work researched the expanded experience in a subatomic, nonhuman, posthuman, inhumane and human air space.
My research has been investigating air, its material an immaterial qualities, how it reacts and moves. And how we take it for granted, with the current repercussions of that obvious.
This year I have been specifically exploring sound in air: (in a covid-zoom-world – digitally removed from real physical experiences – there is still real movement of air molecules between a digital speaker and the human ears).
Research involved workshops and seminars across RCA, and also required investigations into physics of sound waves, human ear biology, sub atomic and atomic vibrations, including feedback, distortion, loops, As well as sound and air as ecological systems, digital vs acoustic materiality of air, immateriality, new materialism, phenomenology, and speculative reality.
In history air has been a focus – Democritus and Aristotle, Lucretius – the elements “ether” – air has also been seen as Gods and legends and myths. Today we have all but given up understanding it frequently saying it cannot be put into language -“Sunyata”. I enjoy the ability to embrace the uncertainty, embrace the contradictions, embrace the unknown experienced in this research of art and air.
In art history too – I can trace direct interest in the withdrawn in air to Turner, Constable and the Impressionists, also Marcel Duchamp, Futurists, Art of Noise, and later, Smithson, Irwin, Judy Chicago and the California Light and Space Movement and Takis. Including today Turrell, Eliasson, Saraceno and even more so from the new materialism and ecofeminism front – Yoko Mohri, Marina Rosenfeld who also explore sound in space.
My research collaborating with air, sound and technology, impacted with art history, theory and quantum science has exposed, for me, a paradox: Sound is vibrations. There is no stillness. So there is no silence.
Sound is atoms clashing in air caused by and causing vibrations. Our human senses translate vibrations in air to understand our environment around us. This piano wire instrument expands our vibrational senses to be more like other species who sense more widely.
Sound is traditionally broken into the categories of: music or noise – the organised chords or the discordant. Music is about timing and being, noise is more timelessness and becomingness, as Christopher Cox suggests.
I am interested in noise, as a chance insight into becomingness. Beyond our limited humanness there is so much to explore and discover.
This research is put forward as evidence that what at first might appear quiet, static, inert, with initial investigation emerges as a state of chaos, and with further experimentation becomes apparent that we are existing with air more in a state of becoming within longer rhythms, loops, reverbs, clashes and echoes.
By expanding the reach of sound beyond human perception, I can state from this research that there is no evidence of nothing, of void. Clashes, ruptures, shapes, pressures, flows, change is happening in air continuously. Mostly we are oblivious to it.
I am not the first to say this of course, for example Heidegger “Nothing nothings”, artists Carey Young “Missing Mass”, Marcel Duchamp (found sound), Takis “Musicales”, John Cage “4.33”, Einstein, and in contemporary philosophy Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier to mention a few, but I was intrigued to find it in this work, when I was not sure if I could find anything at all with piano wire and air.
This instrument is providing a tool for human experience of some of the withdrawn erratic behaviour in the non human active expanded field. I see this technology as prosthetics for the senses to discover found sound. Ultimately letting the piano wire and air air become, as John Cage suggested in his 1957 Experimental Music writings: “not seeking to control but seeking a way of waking up to the very life we are living” in co-existence.”
Shirley Renwick
April 21 2022.
…always, 2022 (Print)
Individual prints, each separated by 10 second spacetime.
1.8m x 1m or 90cm x 50cm
100% cotton, ink
Also shown at the Royal College of Art Masters in Sculpture final Show. Read More
More info
a renewed commitment to life and decay, always (sound visualisation in code) – Live visualisation in code projected into space and responding to ecological acoustics in room from piano wire and air.
close up of a renewed commitment to life and decay, always – Piano wire, piano, foamboard, sensors. Close up of sound sculpture installation
close up of a renewed commitment to life and decay, always – Piano wire, piano, foamboard, sensors. Close up of sound sculpture installation
close up of a renewed commitment to life and decay, always – Piano wire, piano, foamboard, sensors. Close up of sound sculpture installation
Self generating string motion from air resonance and vibrations, from a renewed commitment to life and decay, always.
a renewed commitment to life and decay, always. In Museum situ.
In this solar powered bulletin*, an update on human data is given to the Earth’s networks. Available in real time at noon (GMT time). (*Live broadcast transmission may fail on cloudy days.)
Hope (We want it back), Shirley Renwick, Installation, confetti paper, air. First Impressions Exhibition, The Safe House, London, June 22-29 2021
25,002 tissue paper confetti pieces, dropped on the threshold of The Safe House, London.
First Impressions Exhibition,
The Safe House, London, SE15 3SN.
22-27 June, 2021
Confetti – a ritual object, for celebration, love, joy, union, togetherness; A fragile tissue of pastel circles which floats in the air at weddings in the UK.
Threshold: A doorway or entrance to a home, usually one of a newly married couple will be carried over the floor barrier. Traditionally used to keep the flooring inside the house.
Hope – strong, fragile, seductive, contagious, vulnerable, optimistic, possibilities, unlimited. Ending violence against women one man at a time.
UN figures show that 137 women across the world are killed every day by a partner or member of their own family – a total of 50,000 women a year murdered by people they know and should be able to trust, or 25002 to the date of this show.
London Air Today (after Koons) Shirley Renwick 2019
London Air Today (after Jeff Koons)
100 balloon dogs filled with London air.
Collaboration with Kings College London, Air Quality information
Banqueting Hall, Chelsea, London
May 2019
Artist: Shirley Renwick
Shirley Renwick 