Sixteen circular birdsong pieces
HDF and Perspex
Each one is 46cms diameter
Joseph Beuys said, in a world ‘where everyone talks too rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear’. Here, in this work, the enchanters are the birds.
I have been interested in visualisations of birdsongs on and off for nearly twenty years, and since 2016 have been working with the artist and natural history sound recordist Geoff Sample on a series of pieces based on dawn chorus recordings made at Cheeseburn Grange in Northumberland.
One of the things a visitor to Cheeseburn first hears is the rich and liquid sound of birdsong … a joyous and uplifting singing of the world. At Cheeseburn, rather than a white-noise backdrop to the world, our environment becomes enchanted with the song of Blackbird, Song Thrush, Wren, Goldcrest, Blue Tit and many more birds.
Enchantment, says the author Patrick Curry, is ‘inherently participatory, as the etymology of the word implies: en chantment from the Latin and thence Old French, meaning to be in song … it is fundamentally relational. It is wonder at, or enchantment by, another. It’s not power over them, nor being the object of power’.
These pieces were installed in the Chapel at Cheeseburn in 2024.
Please click here to see more about this project.