Two Queens, Leicester, 2024
SJ Blackmore, Naomi Frears, Leila Galloway and Alice Mahoney
Sound Solid Liquid Light is a new collaboration and installation by SJ Blackmore, Naomi Frears, Leila Galloway and Alice Mahoney, incorporating sculpture, film and sound.
These four artists have found points of connection in their diverse practices to develop this new work for Two Queens in Leicester building on work made last year for Flamm, a contemporary art festival in Cornwall.
Working with clay, organza, electronic beaters, video, and sound, the work explores sensations around structures, framing, shimmering bodies of water, rhythm, and colour.
Small beaters driven by solenoids activate sounds from the ceramic sculptures. The objects become the performers producing percussive rhythms, while other objects are given voices which respond to the overall soundscape. The ceramic sculptures have a fluidity, some looking like they are on the verge of collapse. With a blurring of the states of clay at different stages of making, the material has led the process.
The sound is designed in the form of a suite transitioning from restrained and rhythmic to rich and harmonic.
The green organza curtains are sculptural, creating an atmosphere as they direct you towards the centre. They delineate the space acting as both an enclosure and a veil. They become a second skin around the work, sometimes revealing, sometimes concealing.
In the film, tiny scenes are framed and overlap. Artists test out ideas and arrange the sculptures that form the final work while the flowing and rippling of water acts as a kind of punctuation taking us both into and away from the intimate world of the sculptures.
All of these elements, in conversations with each other, create an enveloping and immersive experience.
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