Chris A. Wright

These are a few thoughts about the three works in the exhibition, Echoes of the Beach and Dear Passengers which were also shown at Lange Nacht at Atelier M82, Osnabrück and ..waits for no-one which is a new work.

Voices creep out from an open door

Bells chime and mingle with street noises

Water splashes over the pavement from a fountain

A word is dropped in the street

An animal rustles hidden in a hedge

And the train glides across an unseen border

Weaving threads of thinking, drawing, making and writing into a multi-disciplinary practice with a focus on sound, my work begins with listening and just being, feeling the present, there and then. Later, I will gather sounds as if picking flowers, I make a noise in response to a space and using experimental instrumentation, sound-songs and humming to reveal the hidden, the lost and the often unheard. This is an intersection of body, space, time and sound in the performative actions that are ambiguous and fluid.

As part of my practice, I have recorded in an anechoic chamber to hear what silence is - a Gedanken experiment; sailed paper boats down the Mekong River between Thailand and Laos disrupting the map-drawn border line; traversed the jagged border between USA and England at American Acre, Runnymede; hummed in a crypt in Sardinia with Sabine feeling the vibrations in the ancient space, imitated early morning birds and monkeys in India with a soprano recorder to try and create a ‘dialogue’ and recorded 400,000 bees going into hives in Birmingham despite my allergy.

All these things have contributed to my current work where I have used different ongoing ideas as a basis to start from. In line with my current practices, I have taken water samples to continue with my work Lode, an art, science, environment project; continues my Slow Running project to contribute to a publication later this year with artist group, RAN, Running Artfully Network and used the train journey to Osnabrück and back as a sequel to to and fro, shown at Broadway, Nottingham in 2023.

In See Hear!! for Building Bridges, I have returned once again to the notion of time and the space it inhabits in our mind and body. Our mobiles being an ever-present reminder of when and where we are. The three pieces shown here, ….waits for no-one, Dear Passengers and Echoes of the Beach reflect on different ways of looking at the past, present and future. In ….waits for no-one, surrounded by the random sound of ticking clocks and chimes, these markers of a moment in time  are further disrupted by the presence of a swing that invites the viewer to sit and swing, lifting the feet off the ground and removing the anchors that keep us in place. Each movement creates a mechanical beat, a tick tock, almost, whilst the participant is taken mentally to a alternative time that may be meditative or even nostalgic. Contrary to this exploration of the moment, plants grow around the swing in their own time-frame. Dear Passengers takes a longer view and is a kind of documentary of the journey from UK to Germany. Beginning with a 6m long drawing of passing events, none of which are finished, made as the train travels under the sea, through France, Belgium, The Netherlands and, finally, Germany. Punctuated by announcements in other languages, text messages, passenger chatter, time is a long haul, a space that seems not to end and closely linked to state of mind. As the mind and body grow more tired as the day goes on, the perception of the surroundings changes, the drawings become even more sketchy until the last stop, Osnabrück. It is as though another world has been entered as if awakening from hibernation. Finally, in the third piece, Echoes of the Beach, time again becomes less grounded and seems to float away in a cloud of its own making and then is drawn back, resonating into the narrow space of its creation. Through a trio of influences, three voices respond to the space, each other, a drawing to make an unrehearsed, improvised sound-song. Time has been allowed to float freely; it was not measured.

Through these three ways of hearing and sensing, time becomes nebulous, ambiguous and shows itself up for what it is, a measurement.

Further thoughts can be found at https://chriswright.co.uk/sound-time-and-self