Sarah Rose
3-channel sound installation, 12 mins, 2017
Sound Mix by Richy Carey
“Sarah Rose’s ‘Memo to Spring’ (2017) contrasts intimacy between persons with their relations to and understanding of their environment. Rose’s voice speaks sporadically between three speakers, interlacing passages quoted from correspondence between biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) and her lover Dorothy Freeman (1898-1978) along with, amongst other things, descriptions of a tsunami threat and hormone biology. The intimate passages focus on descriptions of a meeting place called ‘the shore’, which comes to represent a space that should be defended both for its value to their relationship but also as a complex and sensitive ecological site. Rose’s sculptures form an impediment or boundary across the room, placing us, as it were, on the shore to absorb their anthropocenic narrative.” Calum Sutherland, MAP Magazine, Dec 2017.
We composed a sound piece that played over 3 separate channels in the exhibition, with the dialogue moving between each speaker in slow, tidal waves, amongst long accordion breaths and incidental creaks and cracks. Between the sound in the space and the materials in the room, the works spoke to tidal movement, what is held and let go of through materials, humans and the non-human, the porous ways these are enmeshed.
Memo to Spring was exhibited at NOW, National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One, Oct 2017 - Feb 2018.