Live performances staged in a sculptural installation of the same name by Paloma Proudfoot

“The exhibition is accompanied by a performance, made in collaboration with Aniela Piasecka and composer Ailie Ormston. Ormston’s oscillating sound piece Lay Figure begins with a resounding clang of the tuning fork. Gradually distorted echoes and percussive drilling enter in, as the soundscape begins to swell. We tune in. We tune out. Throughout the performance, we are introduced to the physical and recorded sounds of the moving ceramic mannequin, its creaking joints are held together with bungee cords, amplifying the sense of intense strain. The pace of the piece is drawn out, each texture, each tone lengthened to its limit. To experience this work fully, we must become active listeners. This level of attentiveness invokes composer Pauline Oliveros’s thesis on Deep Listening, where listening becomes a conscious, multi-faceted act that heightens our spatialised awareness to the material world of which we are a part. Oliveros also repositions the deliberate act of listening as a way to deepen connection to one another:

‘Listening involves a reciprocity of energy flow; exchange of energy; sympathetic vibration: tuning into the web of mutually supportive interconnected thoughts, feelings, dreams, vital forces comprising our lives; empathy; the basis for compassion and love.'”

Amrita Dhallu