Naomi Pearce
Stereo, Sound production by Richy Carey, 2022
Almost Conceptual is the first in a series of creative responses to materials from the Matt’s Gallery Archive. After being given unlimited access to the gallery’s vast archive, the writer Naomi Pearce follows a trail of correspondence back to the 1970s; a box of postcards is discovered, and a former office secretary receives a phone call…
Combining interviews with site writing and fabulation, this aural investigation wills archival objects into action through voice and sound, while tracing the silences, withdrawals, and feelings of ambivalence this reanimation provokes. Part prequel, part post-mortem, Pearce asks questions about the roles we play in work and life, about who gets to take up space in history, and why it is some people want to disappear?
Naomi came to work with me in the studio, where over the course of a week we created a film noir inspired podcast, recording dialogue, creating foley and different soundscapes to illustrate the different locations the narrator moves through in her forensic investigations of the gallery’s archive.