| The weightless art of sonic gardens
The trance droning of quartz bowls and the discordant sounds of a digital sampler may seem like a strange combination to some, but Laura Kavanaugh and Jasmine Poon saw them as a natural complement. Both Laura and Jasmine were interested in the idea of combining the sonically organic with the synthesized, and the result was their collaborative project, Sonic Garden.
"I find that working with electronics, in my own imagination,… (is) a very pure sound of nature somehow," says Laura. "I know that people think that rather peculiar but… if you follow the line of electricity from the plug in the wall to the waterfalls, it has a lineage back to nature and sound. The curious thing is, there are times when (we're performing) that you can not tell whether it's the electronic instrument or the acoustic instrument which is actually generating the sounds."
This fusion of borders between electronic and acoustic is what first drew Laura to Jasmine's performance. "I guess I was interested in something that (Jasmine) said about when she was setting up once. There were some other people playing that same evening… and she was doing a bit of a sound check, and there were also guitarists hooking up their guitars to amps. They were all confused because they were getting this feedback but it was actually Jasmine's bowls."
The bowls Laura refers to are nine pure quartz crystal bowls that emit a pure sound wave when tapped by mallets. The crystal bowls came into Jasmine's possession through a chance meeting in Mexico.
"When I was travelling in Mexico, I met a fellow (who) was working with sound… as a healing modality," she says. "At the time I was promoting people in their healing work and he came and shared his work with me. When I heard (the bowls) it was just the most incredible, profound thing… I reached a place of home and peace inside…. He left and went to Europe and left (the bowls) with me. The bowls actually started talking to me, whether you want to call that your inner voice or intuition or whatever, they were saying 'play me, play me'…. Once I said 'Yes, I'm going to do this,' it just flowed."
Laura came to her sound performance by way of the visual arts.
"I was working on very large paintings and continually getting upset about the whole physicality of producing matter that I found a burden (as to) how to manage," says Laura. "I remember talking to Mark Dicey once and he was talking about having to move and how you start to put the canvases and different art into the van. At first, you're putting everything in there nicely and then, by the end, you take your foot and just shove it in there. And I said to him, 'I really just want an invisible, weightless art form.' "
Laura's new weightless art draws on digital and analog effects in real time to shape sampled sounds in an improvised way.
"I use different things: recordings from my own piano or violin playing or samples from other compositions. I've used samples from my collaboration with Mark Dicey where we did a drawing that we hooked up to a contact pick-up…so (they were) very architectural, mechanical sounds. I used a piece from a David Behrman composition, "Wave Train" (1966), that I did in Cambridge University with Ian Birse and Matt Rogalsky. We hooked up electronics inside a grand piano and brought the levels to feedback, then worked with the sound once we got all the strings humming."
When asked what the audience can expect during their upcoming performance at the Devonian Gardens, both artists advocate leaving any expectations at the door.
" I'm under the impression that bringing expectations to art is rather disastrous," says Laura.
Jasmine echoes this sentiment. "I don't like to have anything rehearsed or planned or assume that a certain environment is going to be a certain way. That takes away from what is possible for the people in the room, (for) the environment and (for) where you are as a performer in that moment, playing in tune with Laura, sensing each other in terms of sounds."
Indeed, Laura continues to evade any expectations in her own artistic practice. "When you're an artist for a long time,… you do a lot of work and you work very hard and there's sometimes this expectation that you want people to acknowledge your work. You realize at some point that, you're sitting there with your birthday hat on, and the only person that your art matters to is you. I just thought, if it doesn't matter to anybody else but me, and I've got my birthday hat on, I'm going to do whatever I like… I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing and I'm fine with that. I just go."
So just go to Sonic Garden. Birthday hat is optional. |
