REVIEWS KIRSTY STANSFIELD
Kirsty Stansfi eld’s latest sound installation, Object Scores (2007), for Tramway’s Project Room, is the result
of a residency with Glasgow’s Art in Hospital organisation, working with a group of elderly women living in a
continuing-care ward. The research for the work is discussed in an accompanying publication that documents
the collaborative process in an email exchange between Stansfi eld and writer/arts producer Penny Rae. There
is also a series of photographs produced by the project’s participants of their accommodation, spaces that are
both domestic and public; a dichotomy that Stansfi eld articulates with great humility in sonic-sculptural form.
Stansfi eld’s work stems from research into sound and the way in which sound-objects can mediate
between people and their surroundings by emphasising their perception of space and movement. Object Scores
is a sound sculpture designed to produce ambient noise. Pickups are located in the large wooden soundbox
placed in the centre of Tramway’s dark project space. It resembles a minimalist object-guitar but oscillates a
little more like a theremin, the volume and frequency of the sound waves changing as we move closer. It is an
object that can be performed – more functional than sculptural, an art of noise in the lineage of Luigi Russolo’s
futurist sound machines. Stansfi eld uses her sound machines to a dif_f erent end, however; they are therapeutic
and social rather than mechanistic and discordant. They allow audiences to examine space sonically, to move
around and become aware of how movement and balance are something felt through our sensitivity to sound
waves in addition to visual, haptic or linguistic cues. The chiaroscuro half-light helps to reinforce the heightened
sense of sonic awareness, subtly drawing our attention to our engagement with the acoustics of the relations
between volumes and bodies in space.
The audience’s presence in the space triggers the resonance of the strings, provoking further movement
and encouraging visitors to become performers and produce the music. The strings respond to touch – they
can be plucked just as the soundbox can be scratched or banged like a percussion instrument, an aspect of the
work which draws on such precursors as John Cage. Unlike Cornelius Cardew’s scratch music, it isn’t scored or
choreographed; it appears mechanically, inscribing a soundtrack to simple passages through an intimate space.
The soundbox acts as a body language amplifi er, permitting gestures and traces to echo in the space. Dif_f erent
people create dif_f erent body maps and timbres; they perform their own intimist domestic dramas.
This is a persuasive means of examining the way in which knowledge is embodied through practice;
an understanding of how we function socially and how we interact through internalised or ritualistic actions
that appear intuitive. Stansfi eld’s work is ultimately a form of intersubjective communication that is articulated
in actions and relations. The discrete and gentle gestures of her aging collaborators, there at the exhibition’s
opening, were empowered through her adaptations of sound and interactive technologies. Just as readily, more
nimble-bodied audiences were given a kinaesthetic means of relating to the limited mobility of the elderly –
a waiting room that creates room for waiting. Neil Mulholland
KIRSTY STANSFIELD:
OBJECT SCORES
TRAMWAY, GLASGOW
2 MARCH – 1 APRIL
Object Scores, 2007,
(installation view)
interactive sound
installation.
Courtesy the artist
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