Ten years ago I was approached by London-based artists Patrick Morrissey and Hanz
Hancock, the duo behind the curatorial project Saturation Point. In January 2015
we launched their exhibition Other Rooms featuring the work of ten artists, all of
whose work was viewed by the light that they emitted.
A decade later three of the original artists return, with the addition of one new
artist and another set of illuminating works. And so in the darkness of the winter
months of 2024, we opened our programme for the year with an exhibition that creates
a sense of place, while also being somehow dislocated from the realm of the real
world. Patrick and Hanz, who often work together as Saturation Point, once again
bring light to the darkness in this project, with a selection of work that is at
once minimal yet intensely immersive. The slowly morphing geometric shapes of the
Saturation Point projection piece Red Stripe Blue provide the majority of the light
for this exhibition, while the work of Ian Thompson provides none whatsoever, being
solely audio work.
These two works taken together ask some interesting questions about the volumetric
qualities of artworks, especially those that work in a dematerialised way such as
digital and sound art. Ian’s work in terms of physicality amounts to a pair of self-built
speakers, a Raspberry Pi for playback and a chair. Barely visible in the space if
it were not for the beam created by the Saturation Point projector, his work arguably
has more presence than a physical sculpture. While object-based sculpture takes up
a fixed amount of real-world space, audio work. depending on non-object-based variables
such as volume and frequencies can occupy spaces far beyond the constraints of physical
works of art. In fact while the volume of sound can be raised to the point that it
can fill other rooms, neighbouring buildings, streets etc., it can also be seen to
be working on a molecular level, affecting objects through vibration (cymatics) or
on a psychological level, altering people’s perception, as can be seen when sound
is used in warfare. The research to try and find the frequencies of the elusive ‘brown
sound’ shows how the vibration aspect could be used to exert certain types of physiological
change on the human system as well, becoming another aspect of warfare.
Underground Lift is a work that uses a collage of sound recordings produced by different
sources. Some are man-made, others are naturally occurring phenomena such as the
Aeolian harp. During the installation of this work, there was a point at which we
took a break and sat around the kitchen table discussing the volume over coffee.
At one point I had to ask if a trumpeter had wandered into the recording and started
playing ‘Reveille’. At this point Ian told the story of a walk in the Isle of Sheppey
were he had perceived the phenomenon of the wind passing over hollow fence posts
producing these sounds. These sounds are resolved in the recording in the form of
what seems like a mournful trumpet voluntary. Other sounds throughout this 11-minute
loop produced different effects through perception in this predominantly dark space;
some visitors found the work calming whilst others found it sinister and unsettling.
Red Stripe Blue by Saturation Point is thoroughly hypnotic in its slowly morphing
geometric shapes looping over and over in infinite space. Once again work produced
or reproduced in the virtual world of the hard-drive begs questions around the possibilities
of scale. Although this work was reduced down to a size that fits on a DVD, the work
itself was designed in such a format that it could also be expanded to fit the exteriors
of large buildings. Here in the basement, the work takes up a large section of wall
at the back of the room. The 2015 Other Rooms exhibition featured the work of ten
artists, while Lost Portals features only three works by four artists, yet there
is no intensity lost in this reduction in the quantity of material. The combination
of Ian’s sound and Saturation Point’s projection work so comprehensively together
in the space (despite having been made independently, for separate purposes) that
any more would be too much.
This applies also to how the works respond to the only other work in The Basement
for this exhibition. Sarah Sparkes’ work is small but in no way slight by comparison.
Sarah’s work draws a line backwards in time to 2015’s Other Rooms for which she created
Flue: an Infinity Tunnel in the fireplace. Sparkes’ great-grandfather had been a
magic-lanternist and her discovery of his slides, damaged by time and environment,
sparked further investigation of optical illusion through the means of light and
mirrors. One particular image took on a significant relevance in relation to the
Lost Portals exhibition.
In the image a woman stands next to an empty fireplace holding a baby. She stands
with her back to the viewer, staring at what should be the wall of the room. But
the wall has disappeared, and has been replaced by a dramatic seascape, at the centre
of which – but far off in the distance – is a fire, presumably on a boat. Is this
some kind of extra-sensory perception? A vision perhaps – has the woman left holding
the baby lost her husband in a fire at sea? The empty fireplace suggests that the
homely warmth has been extinguished by flames at sea. The box that Sarah has created
around this decaying image on glass also refers to the past of her own work as well
as that of her great-grandfather.
Looking deeper into the box one finds another infinity tunnel hiding behind the image,
once again disappearing, this time off into time and space. On the wall below the
Infinite Magic Lantern Box, around shin level, is the fireplace in which Sarah had
created the original infinity tunnel Flue nearly ten years ago. Now it stands empty,
quite obviously only about a foot deep, leading to a hitherto undiscovered magical
realm, a source of bewilderment to all who look into it. Up above, on the mantelpiece,
a memory, a hint of the past or the future, or maybe both, compressed into a single
frame that loops forever and ever and ever and ever ad infinitum…
Bruce Davies | April 2024
