Nell Catchpole
NBCDTP: Selected Works / Processes
Teesmouth. January, 2023. Audio piece for BBC Radio 3 (15 mins)
Soundfield. June, 2021. Durational landscape performance, Cheeseburn Sculpture park.
Yew Tree. June, 2020. Durational landscape performance, Cheeseburn Sculpture park. (7 mins)
Documentation of creative process. September, 2019. Video with descriptive text. (3 mins)
Further works/processes can be found on my website home page.. These include, Sonic Allotments (2021) a series of audio pieces made with different communities and individuals in the Teesside landscape, as well as collaborative projects with artists such as Hofesh Shecter (ROH); Kae Tempest (Edinburgh Festival); Lucy Bailey.
Please listen with headphones and in full screen mode.
1. ‘Teesmouth’ for BBC Radio 3, 2023
This sound piece for Radio explores the Tees estuary - it's living beings and geography - and highlights the current mass marine die-offs, most likely caused by deep dredging to build a new freeport. In situ audio recordings with incidental interviews and live sound improvisation using materials found in place.
2. Sound Field, Cheeseburn, 2021
Durational, ‘ritualised’ performance in the landscape, with tam-tam in the doorway of a hemmel in a large field. The audience were invited to find a place in the field to listen for at least one minute. Each performance day comprised two sessions totalling 5hrs.
The intention of my performance was for the listener to become more aware of the sounds of the landscape as the vibrations of the gong died away. The invitation to consider where the listeners stood in the field brought an awareness of the relationship between themselves, each other, the boundary of the field, the hemmel, the gong, and the birds and trees beyond the boundary.
3. Yew Tree, Cheeseburn, 2020
‘Old Yew’ was a durational event which the audience encountered as they followed a route around the large outdoor sculpture park. This was the first time I had created a piece that took place in real time within the landscape. The audience were free to arrive and move on in their own time. Each performance day comprised two sessions totalling 5hrs.
The piece was made up of pre-recorded bells played through vibration speakers set in wooden bird boxes/’homes’ and the ‘ritualised’, performative ‘sounding’ of trees with a found stick amplified live through a Minirig speaker on my back. The bells (old servants’ bells from the Grange on the site) created a semi-domestic sonic and spatial context for the organic sounds of the trees. My improvised sound-making was in response to the weather, the human and non-human beings who came and went, and the process of coming to know the site over 7 days of performance.
My performance was intended as an invitation for visitors to be curious and listen in new ways to their surroundings.
“A world of animations and vibrations, echoes and agitations, that embeds us within the densities and opacities to which a sonic sensibility may afford deeper engagement…” (LaBelle, 2018).
4. Movements in Soil, SPARC, CUoL, 2019
Symposium "Land Music: Sound practices in the age of ecological crisis."
A sound piece comprising recordings of improvised soundings of a ‘ritualised’ collecting of soil from three different sites. Spheres of differing sizes made of clay from the third site were offered to the audience. A text score gave instructions for sound-making with the clay spheres during the audio playback. The intention was for the audience to engage with the material of place and its journey through time, to consider its relationship to them, to each other, and to the sounds of the landscape from where it came.
TEXT SCORE:
The recordings you will hear are of movements in soil from three sites:
Snape Warren, Suffolk
Gormire Lake, North Yorkshire Moors
The stream in the woods near my house in North Yorkshire
***
You are invited to take one of the clay balls and then either return to your seat,
or find somewhere else to be in the room.
You are invited to – occasionally, or continuously – find ways to
allow the ball to participate in the sound piece.
As you let the ball roll, scrape, tap, or shake,
its movements might be audible only to yourself as you hold it up to your ear,
or heard by others from inside something (eg a cup),
or heard from where it moves in the room.
At some point, you may decide to keep the clay (in some shape or form)
Or, if you decide to give it back, it will be returned to where it came from. “
5. Sonic Stories from East Suffolk, GSMD, 2018
Sound installation piece for seated audience with text video. Recordings of ‘ritualised’ sound-making in the East Suffolk landscape was interspersed with conversation and landscape recording.
Before the sound piece was played, I offered each audience member to select a stone sourced from the sites of the recordings. The holding of the stone brought the audience into an embodied, multi-sensual relationship with the sound-making in the recordings, and the text on the video. The intention was to prepare and engage the audience as active listeners. The dynamics between text, spoken word in the sound piece, and surround sound design were further intended to invoke a sense of enquiry in the audience.