Exploring Sound

Sounding a soul bird
She soars above
the path picked clean,
where crows have eaten
the seeds of life.

Soul bird flies,
cackling over
the scornling attempts
to sell the self.

Soul self hides,
will not be caught
or bought.
She waits,
She waits.

Air eddies move her
and the violin body
of the chest
reverberates
into song.

All well.

Excerpt from Sound Still Catalogue:

The origins of the show
The direct reason for putting together the Sound Still exhibition was Nicola Visser, director of the Remix Dance Company's request that Glenday make some bell vessels, as they wished to choreograph a dance around their sound. This original transaction, involving the resonant object, dance, and dance notation, underlies the content of the exhibition. As a natural progression, Glenday invited Austrian artist Lore Heuermann, whose performance work involving sound and motion she had long admired, to participate.

In previous work together, Glenday and art facilitator Mirjam Macleod had explored process orientated group interactions. Glenday, influenced by Arnold Mindell's process-orientated psychology, where the individual is seen as the participant in an emotional or 'relational field', included Macleod in the collaboration as a facilitator to enable the group to discover its nature as a new entity.

During the collaborative work sessions, some explorations centred on a printmaking experiment by Smuts, that the participants eventually expanded upon. Long interested in the visual marks made by sound, such as sonar printouts, Smuts was intrigued to discover the eighteenth century experiments of German physicist Ernst Chladni.

Wishing to demonstrate the vibrational nature of matter, he had activated a metal plate, fixed horizontally on a vertical rod, by playing its edge with a violin bow. Sand sprinkled over the surface of the plate formed intricate patterns that illustrated the intense activity sound creates in matter. The fact that Chladni used traditional etching materials, such as fine powders and copperplate, encouraged the printmaker to experiment.

The first rough experiments resembled chaos; gradually, intricate patterns appeared. Collaboration with Glenday and ceramicist Christina Bryer led to experimentation beyond printmaking materials, highlighting the transience of sound by transferring sound images to the fragile medium of porcelain.

Subsequently John Turest Swartz, through the medium of film, has taken the process further. More than the representation of a mere phenomenon, his finely tuned work suggests the recording of a kind of cosmic energy at work.

The visualization of the movement of matter by sound, in the seemingly magical way of the experiment with the simple vibrational plate, is an intimation of the fact that energy informs all matter and causes all structure. All matter, including human beings, can be seen as part of an energetic world that includes sound energy; we as living beings share in the same gestational structuring process as all other matter.