I am delighted to announce my latest commission, a sound diptych entitled “The Missing Paintings” for Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne. The work previews this Friday as part of Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship and then is open to the public from May 27th to 17th Sept.

Ravilious painted a number of watercolours in the 1920s whose whereabouts are now unknown. Towner commissioned me, to recreate these paintings using contemporary field recordings taken at the sites of where the original works were thought to have been painted.

Using binaural recording technology, the two sound paintings recreate an immersive experience of being in the landscape, evoking a poetic response to the missing paintings. They do this by placing the listener in the middle of a soundscape from the same location as the missing watercolour, with sounds appearing to come from all around the listener.

Landscape painting traditionally places the natural world in a frame and invites the audience to contemplate the landscape through observation. The Missing Paintings contradicts that notion by placing the listener at the centre of a hyper-real contemporary landscape, where distant traffic noise and the rupture of contemporary life can be faintly heard at the margins of the rural idyll. Both of the original paintings date from an exhibition at St George’s Gallery, 1927 (Source: http://www.ericravilious.co.uk/p/missing-watercolours.html)

Please listen on a good pair of headphones…

The Missing Paintings were acquired for the Towner’s permanent collection after the exhibition.