Exhibition + Performance + Talk
Session One : 19 October 2024 Saturday 3pm
Session Two : 19 October Saturday 4:30pm
Session Three : 19 October Saturday 6pm
£6 | 8 places per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Silence on Loan (2019) is an artists’ book published (ISBN: 978-15272-3880-0) in the form of a 10” singled-sided vinyl dub-plate. Cut with a silent groove, this un-recorded silence is held in the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library and (as required by the Legal Deposit Libraries Act, 2003) the six Agency for Legal Deposit Libraries. The ‘book’ is shelved without the protection of dustcover or sleeve, leaving silence vulnerable to the dust and damage done. Once a year it is taken from the shelf, placed on a turntable, and performed to an audience of listening and non-listening library users. The performance is documented in mono on audiocassette; a recording that is kept unheard only to be rewound and recorded over at next year’s performance.
Classified as ‘Reference only’, Silence on Loan is held behind the electromagnetic barcodes of library security. However, in 2023, permission was given to sign silence out for the purposes of performance or exhibition, enabling a tour of galleries, libraries, conferences, and garden fetes.
“The first gigs of Silence on Tour, included the Unfolding Practice conference at LCF/UAL and Saying Nothing to Say, a Wittgenstein inspired symposium in the Philosophy Department of Warwick University. I am delighted to announce that Project DIVFUSE will be the next gig in this [occcasional] world tour.
For this once [in a while] opportunity, Silence on Loan will be broadcast live at the gallery via micro-FM transmission. The performance will be prefaced by the performed text: Withdrawn from Use: for voice, turntable and occasional pause. Based on an article published in the Journal of Organised Sound (2020), this audio essay* offers a collage of words, imagery, voice, field-recordings, and phone calls. Combining the stage directions of Dylan Thomas, with the poetics of Babbage and Steven Connor and my previous lost and ‘silent’ works, the essay explores silence, as a potential space and communal act of care.
A small table exhibition of other ‘silent’ works, tour ephemera and memorabilia in the form of limited editions and multiples (postcards, zines, badges, posters, etc) will be available for idle browsing and purchase.”
January 2024
“As a visual artist working with sound, I am interested in the materiality of sound and the loss inherent in the act or recording. This sound-based work appears in audible and less than audible forms, which has included corrected typewriter scores and scripts, failed phonographic objects and the covert weak signals of micro-FM transmissions. This work has been performed, transmitted, heard and unheard across the UK, Europe and Americas. Recent transmissions and exhibitions include Harakka Island Radio. (Finland. 2023), The Towards Sound Festival. (Berlin, 2022) and Helicotrema X (Festival of Recorded Music). (Museum Punta della Dogana, Venice. 2021).
I received a PhD from the Department of Sculpture at Winchester School of Art in 2003 and am interested in the alternative forms of communication practice-based research affords. I have performed my research as texts at galleries, conferences and symposia.
In 2023 I performed the essay, Tapping the Air at the Radio Preservation Task Force conference at the Library of Congress, Washington. In 2022, the text work, ‘I am not imagining this…’ was nominated for ‘Best Imagined Sound’ in The Sound of the Year Awards. It didn’t win.” – Sebastiane Hegarty
@sebastainehegarty | @listenthroughthewaves | @practiceasresearch
https://sebastianehegarty.wordpress.com
Images by Sebastiane Hegarty