Nell Catchpole
NBCDTP: Selected Works / Processes
Please listen with headphones in full screen mode
Teesmouth
BBC Radio 3
& Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
“People Powered” Exhibition, 2023
This sound piece for BBC Radio 3 and subsequent video 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.
Holdings, Field Trip & Gongs of Teesside
Documentation of process, 2023
I am developing ways to document my practice using audio, film and photography.
Holdings documents my VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) residency, I stayed within walking distance of the residence, but took the same stone with me throughout the week: it became a ‘ritual object’ as I/the stone explored its different affordances across different sites in the landscape.
For the Field Trip for MIMA, I returned to the places I had recorded Teesmouth, retracing the original process with members of the public who used ‘mini zoom’ recorders to make their own sonic responses. I invited them to record their spoken reflections. The event was published in MIMAZINA along with an accessible ecological listening process.
For the first stage of Gongs of Teesside, (UKRI-funded), I am developing a collaboration with blacksmith, Peat Oberon. The video briefly documents the first test session where he forged a small gong out of mild steel, from a disc cut at a nearby steel cutters. The next test will involve another blacksmith as well as Peat and we will work with a larger piece of steel, possibly without using the (carbon emitting) furnace.
Filming in Field Trip and Gong Test by Rachel Deakin
Soundfield & Yew Tree
Cheeseburn Sculpture Park, 2020 & 2021
Durational, ‘ritualised’ performances in the landscape.
Sound Field: 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. 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.
Yew Tree: with ritual object (stick) found in situ, and recordings of servant bells played on vibrational speakers in bird boxes. Audiences encountered the ongoing performance as they toured the sculpture park. Magical, unexpected, strange - the performance aimed to shift habits of perception and experience the environment from new perspectives.
“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).
Sonic Allotments
Sonic Arts Week, 2021
Over a sixth month period, I developed processes with 5 different local communities in Tees Valley, each involving field recording that documented the group’s relationship with the land. Each process resulted in a sound piece that responded to the specific group of people. the place and its ecology. These pieces were shared on accessible headphones in Centre Square in Middlesbrough throughout the festival. I created a participatory website for the project, which was also featured in MIMAZINA.
The groups were: The Men’s Shed; Barefoot Kitchen Orchard; Cultivate Tees Valley/Bowesfield Primary School; George Dura (Roma musician); Nicole Jackson (yoga teacher).
The Orchard with Barefoot Kitchen, Middlesbrough
Bowesfield Primary School with Cultivate Tees Valley, Stockton
Men’s Shed with Groundwork, Middlesbrough
Sonic Allotments was shared at Sonic Arts Week Festival in Centre Square, Middlesbrough; through a website and in MIMAZINA
Nicole Jackson at Tees River mouth
Movements in Soil
City, University of London Symposium
"Land Music: Sound practices in the age of ecological crisis." 2019
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.
The video documents the audience’s participation. The audio is of the entire pre-recorded piece which the audience responds to following the text score.
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. “
Sonic Stories from East Suffolk
Guildhall School of Music & Drama, “Reflective Conservatoire” Conference, 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.