Sounding Drawing

This project is one of two case studies within the AHRC-funded Time of the Clock, Time of Encounter Pilot Demonstrator Project 2012-13. It launched the sound festival of contemporary music, Aberdeenshire 2012.

Ann Eysermans – P6

I. Sounding Drawing Exhibition and Workshops – Anne Douglas and Kathleen Coessens

Imagine what a Miro artwork might sound like. Consider the visual aesthetics of the Cardew score. How do these trigger visual and sound experience? Sounding Drawing is an exhibition, performance and workshop that explores the boundary space between sounding and drawing.

The dialogue between both artforms confronts experiences of time and space. Trace, gesture and sound patterns emerge in a process of multi-perceptual experience.  It is here that a drawing becomes a score, that a code triggers improvisation, that the rhythm of the body encounters the time of the clock, that the horizon of the eye merges with the track of the ear, and that the individual enters a shared experience.

As a generative process, we have worked with participants to explore individual responses to visual ‘scores’ or score-like drawings and embodied sounds and musical patterns. This experimental process has the potential to surprise and go beyond the initial intentions and materials, creating new work and experiences.

Assembling the materials (visual and sound) (July-October 2012)

We assembled a series of score-like drawings, from music as well as the visual arts, that were in themselves experimental. The range covered music scores that barely contained traditional notation, through open ended graphic codes, to drawings in visual art with ‘musical’ potential. In the exhibition (19 October-19 November 2012), each visual work was complemented by a small sound installation (mp3 player and earphones) ‘sounding the drawing’.

We invited contemporary artists from Belgium and Scotland to bring new work to this project.

Collaborative work (20-21 October 2012)

Through two workshops, participants contributed to the exhibition by means of individual and collective performances and drawings.

Workshop 1: Drawing soundings (20 October 2012)
Participants were invited to explore the 1 minute soundings visually, by drawing. They were then invited to move outside and explore what they heard through drawing.

Workshop 2: Sounding drawing (21 October 2012)
Participants first explored the sounding potential of different materials including formal musical instruments as well as found objects, considering different parameters like density, color, dynamics, orientation and rhythmic patterns. Then working in small groups or as individuals they selected a visual work and prepared a short (max 1′) sounding response (through singing, tapping, beating, or using a found object). Responses were improvisational. These improvisations were recorded in the presence of the whole group. They were later uploaded respectively to the visual works as part of the exhibition.

In this sense the exhibition carried elements of co-creation, allowing for new ways of experiencing the visual work and the sound patterns.

In both workshops, a discussion about the experience of gesture and sound, time and space followed the creative activity, exploring the meaning of the artworks in personal experience.

II. Sounding Drawing Sounds Performance – Kathleen Coessens and Ann Eysermans

Kathleen Coessens and Ann Eysermans gave a music performance related to the exhibition, bringing their own musical interpretations (improvisation and composition) of visual work, based both upon pre-existing experimental music scores as well as the Sounding Drawing exhibition: maps, drawings, cardiograms. The music explored the contradictions and similarities of temporality, drawing upon experiences in life and art.