The Current is Coming Towards Us
14. – 28. September 2018
Diana Duta
Sophie Mackfall
Sara Trillo
»We are of the sea,
and the sea is of us.«
Deborah Cramer
Just as currents are caused by the weather, we are shaped by the immaterial forces of an increasingly globalised world. This year’s residents dive down deep to engage with the underlying currents less visible to the eye, exploring the flows and connections that may change an entire place, its language or its people.
‘Riddles and Vowels’ investigates how the local language of the Angels, many of which emigrated to Great Britain in the 5th century, has changed over time and space. Duta’s sound performance takes inspiration in the ways sound travels within the vocal tract to produce an ‘Umlaut’ — a Germanic harmony of two vowels originating in the phonological change of Old English and Old Norse during times of migration. Her composition texturises this historic framework through the overlapping of recorded voices from local residents and British equivalents. Slowly revealing the intrinsically joined nature of language beyond geographical boundaries, Duta creates an undulating soundscape that allows to contemplate movement in language, territory and across time.
Diana Duta (b. 1985 Bucharest, ROU) studied Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and Sociocultural Linguistics at Goldsmiths University in London. She works with visual, aural and nearly verbal language through performance, sound composition or writing. Duta’s work relies gently on translation and the re-interpretation of existing materials as techniques for generating new meaning.
www.dianaduta.com
‘Wet ‘N’ Wild’ is not only produced within the conditions of local weather, but being exposed to them is part of their final presentation. Sophie Mackfall’s canvases flap in the wind and escape the static characteristics of a white cube installation in many ways. Through painting on canvases and sails, cutting them up and stitching them back together, she deconstructs a work influenced by the colours she is surrounded by during her stay. Reflecting the unchanging regional landscape of sailing boats and meadows with their horizontal and vertical lines, delineating consistency with signalling colours, she simultaneously conflates these irrefutable elements with fluctuation emerging from futile conditions such as the local wind and rain.
Sophie Mackfall (b. 1984 in York, UK) studied at The Royal College of Art in London and The Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow. Her work is informed as well as shaped by the environment in which it is being produced.
‘The Arnis Quest’ uses the notion of the quest as a process to search for something that is difficult to find, in this case traces of the Angles — the Germanic people who settled in Great Britain. While performing her own expeditions to specific coastal places in South East England and around Arnis, Trillo has been collecting materials to form a marine palette with which she constructs artefacts from that relate to mythological, historical and fictional stories even though their functionality might not be clear.
Sara Trillo (Ramsgate, UK) studied at Norwich School of Art and Canterbury School of Art. Her practice emerges from the desire to collage fragments together to generate meaning and to set up fictional structures in which she is acting as a puppet master, attempting to bring all the diverse collaborative elements together.