Dear Alys (2020)
[Online presentation]
For some time I started to design imaginary instruments, and sometimes I tried to make them though often the outcome was silence. Once, during this time, a person greeted me in the pub and said "oh you're the artist making instruments", and I smiled at their invisibility. Over time, I came to realise that the imagination of a work would always be different to the work in actuality and that the conversation circulating around the invisible object; may be enough to sustain it: an open-ended sequence.
Dear Alys is a multi-layered record of a presentation and group discussion I conducted via my friend the artist Lydia Davies. Moving through
the central image of a fog cloud, I presented notions of family through sensations of the archive & the places we think we belong to. The audience's reflections were gathered inwards in my absence and sent back to me as an audio file, from which I continue to work with as live matter.
Dear Alys expands out into other correspondences, including with Andrew Dipper, a violin restorer in Minnesota with whom I've been exchanging e-mails with for 15 years. Here, the sound of the landscape relies only on itself, where temporal gestures act as tools that question the duration of a work and its lifetime, respecting absences, voids, and the necessity for the unknown as generative forces in practise.
The project is documented through slide projection, sound experiments, e-mails and live conversation.






