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Image: Gallery DODO

The Postcard Show: 9th February – 24th March

Delighted to be one of 25 artists, invited to contribute to The Postcard Show, which opened at Gallery DODO, Brighton on Friday 9th February. 

In the exhibition introduction, Gallery DODO write: ‘One can confidently say that more postcards have been sent from, rather than to, the seaside resort of Brighton. However, it’s never entirely one-way traffic. The artists and works included in the exhibition share a consideration of the postcard as an art object in itself – the artwork is the postcard rather than just on it- and utilise, in varying ways, the everyday process of the postal service, its recto/verso and image/text form, or engage with the postcard’s conventions.’ 

To ‘widen the gene pool of contributing artists, and distance themselves from the curatorial selection process, Jon Carritt & Dan Palmer, asked each of the initial 15 artists approached to invite an additional artist of their choosing to also mail a postcard to Gallery DODO. The arrangement of postcards in the gallery is ordered by their date of arrival and displayed in such a way as to make both sides visible.

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  Screenshot

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Images: 1: Gallery DODO. 2: Micah Lexier. 3: Sebastiane Hegarty (Ph: Saskia Takens Milne). 4: Saskia Takens Milne. 5: Scott Robertson (Ph: Saskia Takens Milne). 7: Steven Emmanuel. 6: Helmut Smits.

My own postcard went through several incarnations before a stamp was finally licked. Compliant with the A6 proportions of postcard etiquette, Silence second class, is a stereo set of two dumb, hand stamped and hole-punched, 300gsm cards. Both are pierced through with a small circle of tiny holes; a visualised acoustic pattern reminiscent of speaker ‘grills’ or the microphonic mouthpiece of landline telephones. This hollow array is juxtaposed with a small, rubber-stamped word: On one card the word, Silence and on the other, Listen.  With a graphical and conceptual nod to Yoko Ono’s Hole to see the sky through (1971) the postcards proffer a shift of listening attention away from the audible, toward the post audible, the unheard and the imagined, the infrequent modulation and tinnitus shush of weak or empty signals.

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The Postcard Show runs until 24th March 2024.
Viewing by appointment.
DM Gallery DODO on Instagram (@aproposdodo) to arrange a time. 
Gallery DODO, 
c/o Phoenix Art Space
10-14 Waterloo Place
Brighton
BN2 9NB
UK

Please be aware that the gallery can only be accessed via a staircase. 

unintentionally blank

A ‘live’ diptych recording of rehearsal tapes for the performed Mare Street Variation of the text piece: I am not imaging the sound of these words, you are, is now available on Bandcamp. The Mare Street Variation (for typewriter, cassette and an empty house), was intended to be performed last September, as part of the exhibition Din, at 195 Mare Street, Hackney, London . Sadly, due to illness, I was not able to take part.

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However, I decided that a record of my not performing should still be available. I had rehearsed the performance at home, using two portable mono recorders to simultaneously document and duplicate the action. The unreliable nature of these obsolete recorders, meant there were quite a few rehearsals, each taped over its failed predecessor, leaving both tapes puckered with sudden magnetic bursts of sound and silence.
I released these two tapes as a limited edition cassette diptych: on side ‘R’ of each cassette, a record of the rehearsals for the performance; on side ‘P’, an unintentionally blank ferrous record of a performance that never took place. Packaged in the shredded papery remains of the typed texts and including a free I am not listening conference card, these two original tapes have now been sold and delivered.

Before they were dispatched, I gave a private performance of the rehearsal tapes in the room where they took place. I created a stereo digital recording of this performed mono duet and this new Mare Street Variation is now available to be listened to and downloaded on Bandcamp. 

Saying nothing

‘[The Tractatus] exists in two parts’, wrote Wittgenstein, ‘the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. […] I’ve managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’.
Extract from introduction to: Saying Nothing to Say: Sense, Silence and Impossible Texts in the 20th Century.

In May I was invited to present a paper at, Saying Nothing to Say: Sense, Silence and Impossible Texts in the 20th Century; an interdisciplinary conference, supported by the Humanities Research Centre and organised by Tabina Iqbal at the University of Warwick. Bringing together speakers from literature, philosophy, art history and photography, the conference ‘trace[d] the contexts, conflicts, and legacies of Wittgenstein’s claim:

“In art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying nothing.”’ (ibid)

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Images: Silence on Loan | Silent [tyre] print | Silence Lost:North Sea (Times Announcement)

Since 2004, my sound practice has included a series of silent releases: unheard, unwritten works, sometimes performed, sometimes transmitted, often forgotten and occasionally lost. One of the most recent of these, Silence on Loan is an artists’ book, published in the form of a single-sided 10” vinyl record – although, cut with a silent groove, it is [not] a record of nothing.

The paper I presented at the conference, Silence on loan: Listening to silence and the unheard, draws on these silent works to explore silence as a potential and communal space: an act or situation of inaction which invites both listener and non-listener into unheard congress. 

In a choreographed montage of words, voice, images, sound and silence, the paper was intended to include a performance of Silence on Loan. However, as part of the Artists’ Books Collection at Winchester School of Art Library, the book is catalogued as ‘reference only’.  Therefore, although available to be handled and ‘used’ by library users, it cannot be removed from the library building. Thus confined, and magnetically protected from theft or ever being borrowed, Silence rests, jacketless on the library shelf, quietly gathering dust and harm, ‘waiting without waiting for’. 

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In conversation with the Head of Collections and curator of the Artists’ Book Collection at WSA, it was agreed that a retrospective contract, hastily signed and methodically duplicated, would permit myself: ‘free access to the artists’ book Silence on Loan on reasonable notice (1 month) being given […] and subject to standard loans procedures, for the purposes of performing it at exhibitions and /or events.’ 

Contract, dated, and signed, Silence was folded up in a shroud of acid free tissue and placed inside a grey archival box. With the passport of its paperwork enclosed, the book was issued, and silence was not only officially on loan, but also on tour. To commemorate, what is hoped to be the first in a series of ‘national’ performances, I created the official merchandise of a Silence on Tour badge, available free to all those attending. 

Saying Nothing To Say was held in the Wolfson Research Exchange on the third floor of the library at the University of Warwick. As I entered the library, silence was heard to breach security, alarmingly announcing its presence as I passed through the magnetic surveillance of the library turnstile.  A ceremony, embarrassingly repeated on exit.

With keynotes by Dr Maria Balaska (University of Hertfordshire) and Dr Thomas Gould, (University of East Anglia), the conference programme included panels on ‘The Missaid: at the limits of language’, ‘The silenced and politics of voice’ and ‘The unsaid’. Speakers included; Juulia Jaulimo (University of Helsinki/Justus Liebig University Geissen), who discussed ‘Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett and the Poetics of Sous Rature’; Imogen Free (Kings College London) who explored the ‘thick almost guttural sound of the voice’ and resounding vocal relations in Rosamund Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove(1953); Owain Burrell (University of Warwick) who discussed ‘working-class’ silence in the parlour of Tony Harrison’s poems, whilst Jarkko Tanninen (University of Nottingham) focused on ‘Silence after Violence’ in the ‘photographic absence of Joel Sternfeld’s, On This Site.’
Details of the full program are available here.

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Returning Silence on Loan to the shelf at WSA, required further papery exchange. A form, confirming that there had been ‘no change’ to the condition of the book was signed and duplicated. Silence was then carefully unfolded from its acid free shroud and slipped discreetly back between the hardbacks at 741.64 HEG.

Congratulations to Tabina Iqbal for organising such a fascinating conference and thank you to Tabina and Matthew Nicholas for making me so very welcome.

off the shelf

January 2023 will mark the fourth anniversary of the publication of Silence on Loan and its subsequent inclusion in the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library. Published in the form of a 10” vinyl record, Silence on Loan sits shyly on the library shelf at 741.64 HEG: Four years of dust and silence have now come to rest in the silent groove cut into its surface.

Every year there is a free performance of Silence on Loan at WSA Library, which this year will take place on Monday the 16^th of January; coincidently the birthday of my mother, who died twelve years ago. In 2022 the Silence was performed without an audience there to hear. This year the performance is open again to the public and to the arbitrary ear of all library users. As with previous iterations, all those there to hear and those who’s listening the silence borrows, will be offered a commemorative hand-made pin badge, produced exclusively for the ‘event’. As an ‘event’ the performance of Silence on Loan is unremarkably low noise and low-key: an uneventful twenty minutes in which Silence is taken from the shelf, placed on a portable turntable, and rotated at 33 revolutions per minute.  The arm of the turntable is swung gently over the edge of the vinyl ellipse, and the needle dropped damply into the silent spiral of the groove. Nine or so minutes later the needle is lifted out of the locked rut of the run-off loop and Silence taken from the platter and returned to its place on the library shelf. This small inconspicuous ritual marks the end of Silence for another year, and is occasionally greeted with a closing, discreet ripple of bookish applause.

Silence on Loan
annual performance with free badge

15:00
Monday
16.01.2023
Winchester School of Art Library
Park Avenue
Winchester
SO23 8DL

To make Silence available to listeners around the world, the performance will also be broadcast live via Instagram: @sebastiane_hegarty 

The idleness of shadows

 

DFTPTMMYAIN, part 3 – The. 2022. Christof Migone. 

Earlier this year, I was one of the twelve artists invited by the Canadian artist and writer, Christof Migone to take part in his 12-year project: Different From The One Place Time Mood Mindset You Are In Now. 

With a knowing nod to Alvin Lucier’s, I am sitting in a room (1969) the invitation was to participate in, The:  the third word and part, of Christof’s annual dozen. Like Lucier’s magnetic room, The, composes its form from an instructed action: 

Room you are not in. Room where you usually make (sounds, images, objects, etc.), but that is currently running on idle. Idling in unintentional sounds. Room is lit but faded in and out after the fact (I will do the fade in fadeout). Camera captures room or detail (up to you), only one position throughout. Presence might be felt but is not present. You were there and you will be there again, but you are not there now.

The room where I make is spare, small and recently painted. It’s also the place where I keep and shelve the things I made and make with. On a desk in the corner there is an iMac with one Sonic Egg studio monitors on either side. An old straw hat perches ergonomically on the left-hand egg. 

The room has one window. When the iMac is on stand-by or off, the window is reflected in its screen; the dusty emptiness of the room behind made visible through the glass darkly. On sunny winter days, the light from the window casts shadows on the wall opposite, shadows that breath slowly in and out of perceptibility. I use these shadows as an opportunity to stop and stare and let myself dawdle in their idleness.

I made two films in response to the instruction. In the first and selected film, the stare of my iPhone is fixed on the wall where shadows appear. I pressed record, left the room and closed the door to. Twelve minutes or so later I returned to press stop. The twelve minutes recorded are uneventful. Shadows are slight and fleeting. The distant spin of a washing machine whines through its cycle. A draft from the open window, pushes and pulls the room ajar, creating spontaneous creaks, which occasionally synchronise with the fluctuations in light and less light.

In a more composed second attempt at idleness, I fixed the stare of the iPhone upon the iMac screen. I muted the microphone, and started a metronome before leaving the room, to return twelve minutes later and press stop. Visible through the blizzard of dust which covers the screen, the reflection of the metronome keeps time silently. An occasional particle of dust, drifting through the air is caught in the sunlight of the silenced room. This silence is replaced with the audible draft of the previous twelve minutes. The silent metronome announces and measures loss, whilst time creaks and idles in the dust.

In the late winter of 2021, sitting in front of the dim mirror of the iMac screen, I started to experience a bright and recurring flash in my left eye. Unlike the stained-glass spiral scotoma of a normal migraine, this light was briefly white and peripheral. Some days later drops of liquid dilated the aperture of my pupil and the attentive lens of the optometrist found a small tear in the retina of my left eye. As if to celebrate my visual field was immediately flooded with millions of black dots. That evening in a small, dark and automatically locked room, small bursts of a laser welded a line around the edge of my retina, the light so bright that my left eye seemed to lose the notion of sight. 

Through winter 2021 and spring 2022, there were four more tears and four more laser surgeries to weld my retina back into place. This has left my vision full of floaters, the remains of cells, casting their shadows on my retina. Like the wall and iMac screen, my visual field is full of dust and the idleness of shadows.

Emergency Eye Clinic: Southampton General Hospital

I am not imagining

I am not Imagining. 2022. Sebastiane Hegarty

I am humbled to have had a new work on paper, short-listed for Best Imagined Sound in The Sound of the Year Awards. The other three nominees were poets Jonty Pennington Twist, Philip Burton and Alastair Hesp, who was announced as the winner in May.

The shortlisted sound is one of a series of new works, which use words and the percussive palpitation of a typewriter to imagine sound [and silence] on paper. The typewriter used is a recently acquired and rather beautiful, cream/green 1959 Imperial No 5 “Good Companion”. The typewriter arrived, fitted with a brand-new ribbon; my words the first to be written in its uncoiling, ink-soaked line of thought. 

In his book Gramophone, Film and Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler considers the typewriter “an innocuous device, an ‘intermediate’ thing, between a tool and a machine,” which ‘cannot conjure up anything imaginary’. But as a medium the typewriter corresponds with the silence of thought and noise of form, and in correspondence it dwells ‘at the cusp where thinking is on the point of settling into’ shape and form on paper.(Tim Ingold)

The noise of these words. 2022. 

In this new series of sounds on paper, the action and restrictions of the typewriter become an inherent component of the work.  The weight, vertical orientation and standardised A4 paper size, are regulated by the dimensions and habits of the machine, whilst the type is set in face and point: this Imperial No.5 types, in a rare Book Type Face, approximately 10 letters to the inch. 

The typewriter’s mechanical carriage of language is noisy and visceral, words strike out rhythms of sound, whilst the gesture and movement of my digits are choreographed and back spaced in correspondence with the words being formed and the systemised array of the Qwerty keyboard.

In this physical correspondence with language, sounds are both audible and imagined, appearing then in the moment of being written and imagined now in the moment of being seen.

A pin drop. 2022

silence was live

Silence on Loan. 2022. Performance broadcast live on Instagram

On the last Monday of January 2022, the annual performance of Silence on Loan, took place at Winchester School of Art Library. It was performed alone in the early morning before the library opened to the public and without an audience present. During the silence I wore industrial Ear Protectors, so even I could not hear the silence as it occurred.

The annual performance was announced in advance on social media and this blog, which included an invitation for people to not attend or listen. The performed silence was however, broadcast live (and mute) via Instagram, so that those who wished, might watch and not listen, together. The Instagram recording of the broadcast was unceremoniously deleted (by accident) immediately after the performance.

In order for those not listening to inform others of their lack of attention, a limited edition, I Am Not Listening, pin-badge, was available to purchase and wear on the day. The 1” pin sold out, adorning the lapels of people not listening, as far apart as New York and Keyhaven, Australia, Berlin and Wolverhampton. 

This year, Silence on Loan was unheard by what could have been its largest audience to date. A big thank you to all those millions of people around the world, who were not listening.

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Withdrawn from use

mo[nu]ment. 2006-8. Sebastiane Hegarty

[Silence]

FIRST VOICE [Very softly] ¹

Shh. Shush. Hush. Schtum. Silence is often something imposed, an instruction to refrain, to not participate, something we leave behind when we hold our tongue and keep mum. It seems appropriate that many of the silencing verbs, which are primarily directed toward a silencing of speech, are onomatopoeic in origin; pre-verbal imitations of sounds that hold voice back from language. Even the physical action of the verbs’ pronunciation requires a narrowing of the mouth, a gesture which in the mumble of closed lips and shushed tittle-tattle of tongue against teeth, mimes the physical restraint of utterance. But the refrain of silence need not be a negative imposition, it might be a positive choice, an elective, collective and possibly selective withdrawal from presence. 

The above paragraph is from, Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing, a new article published in the latest issue of the journal Organised Sound 26/2 (Cambridge University Press). Edited by the composer, musician and academic, Tullis Rennie the issue explores Socially Engaged Sound Practices. In his editorial Tullis introduces a collection of articles which are: 

‘[…] decidedly diverse: in interpretations of ‘sociality’; and in addressing distinct areas and eras of sound practices – the contemporary, canonical and hereto less-heard. Considering this issue as a single entity, the authors thus become united in their aim to diversify the conversation, in decentralising theoretical approaches to the subject matter and in the positive inclusion of a wider variety of voices, experiences, sounding bodies and attitudes to listening.’

I am delighted to be amongst such a diverse and fascinating collection of articles and authors, which includes Catherine Clover, whose article, Oh! Ah ah pree trra trra, extends sociality beyond the human to ‘speculative and expansive interspecies encounters’, Sam Mackay who examines ‘The sonic politics of “Clap for Carers” […] as participative sonic arts practice’ and Chris J. H. Cook whose article, Trevurr: A dialogic composition on dementia, auraldiversity and companion listening, ‘documents important aspects of participatory practice with neurodiverse collaborators, told through the lens of a co-created sound work.’

Duet for Vinyl [extract]. 2004

Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing

Abstract

In his book Giving Way, Steven Connor provides a list of unappreciated qualities. This list starts with a capitalised, ‘SILENCE’. Shyness, reserve, withdrawal and holding back accompany silence in a long sentence of qualities, which ‘tend to be marked with disapproval, sympathy or revulsion’, and some of which are, as Connor notes, ‘characterized as a mental disorder, in the form of social anxiety or social phobia’ (Connor 2019: 1). 

Silence is often seen as a lack of agency, an anti-social and suspect unwillingness to participate. But as a sound artist working with field-recording, I am aware that silence, withdrawal and holding back can also be a form or method of participation and social practice. Since 2004, my sound work has included a series of physical and imagined silent releases. The article draws on these works and the writing of, amongst others, Steven Connor, Seán Street, Hamja Ahsan, Gaston Bachelard and Dylan Thomas, to explore silence as a potential, shared and communal space; an immediate composition that invites both listener and non-listener into its congress. Listening in on the conversation of telephone pauses and the closed paragraphs of library shelves, silence can be heard undoing purposeful agency, shyly engaging us in the anti-social practice of inaction, so that we might not participate, together.

I am grateful to the editor of Organised Sound, Prof Leigh Landy, Tullis Rennie, Jan Baiton and the peer reviewers for their critical guidance and support. Thank you as always Julia Hall for your insight and patient ear.

Organised Sound 26/2 is available on-line here.

1. Dylan Thomas. 2016. Under Milk Wood.
2. Steven Connor. 2019. Giving Way

undoing silence

Around 4pm on Wednesday 25th August at Winchester School of Art Library 2, a slim slither of vinyl will be exhumed from between the hardbacks on the library shelf and placed on the platter of a portable turntable. Silence on Loan is an artist book published in the form of a 10″ vinyl dubplate, cut with a silent groove. [re]Turning at 33 revolutions per minute, silence will ‘play’ for just over 9 minutes and the performance will then be over. 

This year the ‘performance’ will be prefaced by a short reading from a new essay discussing silence and listening as participation. The full essay, titled, ‘Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing, will be published in the forthcoming issue of Organised Sound (26/02).

As has become my habit, the performance will begin by rewinding the cassette recording of last years ‘event’, so that it might be taped over and erased (unplayed and unheard) by this year’s recording.  Once silence is done, the tape player is stopped, the cassette put in its case and silence quietly returned to its position on the shelf at 741.64HEG. 

Postponed due to Covid, the annual performance of Silence on Loan is free to attend, and this year will also be available live and socially distanced via Instagram: @sebastiane_hegarty

Thanks to Catherine Polly and all at WSA Library for their help and support.

return to silence

On Friday the 31^st January 2020, I arrived at Winchester School of Art Library to find a table ‘reserved for activity’. It had been one year and one day since Silence on Loan was added to the Artists’ Book Collection at the WSA Library. Held without the protection of cover or sleeve the book (a single-sided 10” dubplate cut with a silent groove) is shelved at 741.64 HEG. Wedged between the hardbacks, this mute slither of vinyl is easily overlooked, but once a year it is taken from the shelf and placed on the platter of a portable turntable. [Re]turning at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute the dubplate slowly pronounces the dust and harm that has come to its surface: the silence that has been lost. Once played the silence is put back on the shelf, where it is left un-sounding for another year.

As a performance, this annual audition is rather disappointing; nothing much happens for slightly more than nine-minutes. Those who are here to hear (and those library visitors who’s listening the silence loans) listen to silence being broken and unheard.  Perhaps the tables are turned, and it is the listeners who perform the silence rather than the record player’s stylus. For many of those who came, this is a return to silence, having been here last year when Silence on Loan was performed at the moment of its inclusion into library stock. Just as the dust collects in the groove, so silence returns and gathers in the ear of those who come to listen and remember listening again.
Everyone who is, and now was, there to hear, receives a souvenir in the form of a Silence on Loan 2020 pin-badge, whilst a paper wristband and UV hand-stamp, temporarily confirm admission and attendance.

I had been inclined to record each performance, so that I might document and measure the changes that time brings to the silence. But such calculating permanence would surely imprison that which does not sound, that which is fragile, fugitive and evasive. Silence, is more concerned with the potential for sound than its absence, most [in]audible when we imagine what we don’t hear. The analogue frailty of a physical recording can be used to augment this un-sounding potentiality. The performance on the 31^st was documented using an old portable audio cassette recorder. Such obsolete media is characterised by a distinct lack of [hi] fidelity, recording its own imperfections and imposing its own magnetic patina upon the sound it records. This failure to create a faithful document is enhanced by the recording not being monitored – the tape can be seen slowly winding from left to right, but no lights or needles visibly meter the units of volume.

The quantity of tape used measures the duration of silence recorded, transcribing [no] sound into a spatial length, but the cassette is never played, and the silence remains unheard. Paused at this distance, the silence waits next year’s anniversary, when it will be re-wound and next year’s silence recorded over this. An [un] sounding and unfaithful record, this audio document, simultaneously returns and erases the silence of another year.

The next performance of Silence on Loan will be in January 2021