Exhibition :
14 February 2025 Friday 5-7:30pm
15 February Saturday 2:30-6:30pm
16 February Sunday 2:30-6:30pm
Suggested donations £2. No booking required.
Non Mountain is a collaboration between Angus Carlyle, Chrystal Cherniwchan and Craig Tattersall (UK). It was selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No.5 Open Call for work that is based on field recordings.
Initially this project started as a response by Chrystal Cherniwchan and Craig Tattersall to a soundtrack and text by Angus Carlyle, from his collaboration with Chiara Caterina, in which they referenced a passage from the novel Mount Analogue by René Daumal:
For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded, its summit must be inaccessible but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible. (Daumal, 1952)
Through Daumal’s writing and recontextualising on previous work that Carlyle created, a mapping started to unfold, built around layers of interpretation, iteration, and construction. Cherniwchan and Tattersall created a sound piece and made preparatory photographs, that were used as cues to elicit further responses from Carlyle, which involved texts inspired by catalysed memories of the original fieldwork, photographic documentation of forgotten ephemera only re-discovered after Cherniwchan and Tattersall’s prompts and a new composition in the spirit of conversational reply.
In the publication Writer Conversations, comprising of interviews with authors about the practice of writing on photography, Duncan Wooldridge writes:
…the affective act of writing with, the process of writing around the photographic image proposes a diagrammatical model, a mapping of how an image moves and makes forms of contact and interconnection. Understanding emerges from a kind of encircling – values and meanings are drawn from how the image intersects with language and other images. (Wooldridge, 2023)
In this way, “a kind of encircling”, has formed between Carlyle, Cherniwchan and Tattersall, and can be further developed by the exchanges through combined authorship. When working together the ecology of the group’s responses to their combined archives, webbed and embedded into the pages of a book and a soundscape that is a catalyst for expanded realisations. It is the collaborative process for all involved that prompts further experimentation, understanding, and new grounds.
References:
Daumal, R. (1952). Mount Analogue. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Exact Exchange, 2019.
Wooldridge, D. (2023) Afterword (With, Around and Alongside: Reflections on Writing Photography). In Wooldridge & L. Soutter (Eds.), Writer Conversations (p. 133).
Angus Carlyle is a Professor of Sound and Landscape at UAL and a member of the CRiSAP research centre, his creative work shifts between a documentary impulse and a more poetic register, deploys experimental writing and compositions based on field recording, often in collaboration with others. Chrystal Cherniwchan is a Teaching Fellow in Photography at the University of Salford, and uses photography, video, field recordings, and text, in her practice, and considers her projects to be speculative within the field of expanded documentary image/sound making. Craig Tattersall, Technical Demonstrator working in photography, printmaking, sound and video at the University of Salford, works across music and visual art with an interest in their intersection, and often works collaboratively producing art objects and sound works which have been released for numerous labels.
Angus Carlyle | anguscarlyle.com | @anguscarlyle
Chrystal Cherniwchan | chrystalcherniwchan.com | @chrystal.cherniwchan
Craig Tattersall | leavings.co.uk
Image from the artists
