Thalassa, Forest Phrase, Thresholds, Sila
Visual artist Genevieve Swifte and composer Cheryl E. Leonard have explored the environments of the High Arctic and Southeastern Australia via photography, drawing, field recording and musical compositions. Their collaborative works create a series of thresholds between sound and light, height and depth, imagery and musicality.
In the context of the Australian landscape, the point of reference between Swifte’s and Leonard’s practices occurs at dawn when the silence of the human world, the prevalence of bird song, and quality of early morning light, create the ideal conditions for both field recording and photography. For Thalassa and Forest Phrase, the artists undertook field research at the Kioloa campus of the Australia National University in 2015.
Thalassa (3:06, 2:35, 4:09, music and works on paper, 2016) Swifte created three artworks in which photographs of the ocean are fused with meticulous pencil drawings. Leonard then crafted a piece of music in response to each artwork. In these compositions, sounds performed on sand, glass, stones, and steel intertwine with field recordings from Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park and Sutro Baths in San Francisco.
Forest Phrase (field recordings paired with photographs, 2015)
Cottage Birds 1, 2:54
Butlers Creek 1, 3:43
Forest Birds, 4:42
Kookaburra Frogs, 3:50
Butlers Creek 2, 2:06
Cottage Birds 2, 2:56
Leonard’s recordings from New South Wales are rich with bird song: from lyrebirds hidden in the dense forest to the noisy chatter of parrots around the historic cottages of the Kioloa campus. Together with these recordings, thirteen photographs by Swifte form a sequence through which the audience might move deeper into the forest to where the light is scattered by both the canopy and the camera lens.
Both artists have spent time in the High Arctic. Leonard explored Svalbard in the fall of 2011, and Swifte lived in an Inuit community in Northwest Greenland for parts of 2011-12. Their Arctic collaborations reflect on the heightened qualities of light and sound that can be found in these remote locales, as well as wider concerns about human relationships with the natural world.
Thresholds (9:32, music and video, 2015) is a work about tensions between inner and outer, domestic and wild, the human world and the natural world. Swifte’s video looks out through a window at a stormy ocean in Upernavik, Greenland. It is paired with music performed by Leonard on glass, limpet shells, driftwood, kelp, and feathers, in combination with field recordings of wind from Svalbard, and the Pacific Ocean in California.
Sila (10:57, music and video, 2012) Meaning weather, air, climate, intelligence/consciousness, the Inuit concept of Sila links the individual self and the environment through the breath. A comparison might be made with the ancient Latin sense of spiritus that connects the individual’s breath with a divine force. This collaborative work describes the freezing surface of the ocean through Swifte’s photography and Leonard’s music. The complexity of the concept of Sila evokes many possibilities, from reciprocity to site specificity, from cultural connections to an inspired approach towards policy and activism. Woven across the duration of the video, the composition evokes the aural expression of a cold and rapidly changing environment. Sound sources for the music include penguin and cormorant bones, feathers, Arctic stones, Antarctic limpet shells, kelp flute, prepared viola, and field recordings of wind and water from both the Arctic and Antarctic. Filmed at minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit in the high Arctic, the video captures the liminality of the ocean, as ice crystals form on a surface that is ephemeral and evanescent. An exquisite moment between earth, sea, ice and sky, the work is a contemplation of the elements and the temporal process of crystallization.
