Gloucester Fabulous Sound Machines
July 17th to September 4th
Imagine ... a world of colour and sound that you can control.
Throughout the summer, Gloucester City Museum becomes home to a unique exhibition that invites visitors to touch, explore and create their own orchestra of sounds.
Internationally respected artists and musicians from Sweden, Germany, France and the UK have created sculptures that also act as intriguing musical instruments. Fabulous Sound Machines includes strings that you pluck to create colour and music, a doorbell 'organ', a harpsichord containing an Aladdin's cave of objects rather than strings, a giant wind instrument with bellows and pipes, and much, much more.
All of the individual sound sculptures are framed in a world of colour created by artist Peter Jones and composers Lawrence Casserley and Simon Desorgher. Other contributors include Johannes Bergmark, Hugh Davies, Dan Knight and Will Menter.
LOCATION: Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery Brunswick Road, Gloucester GL1 1HP. Tel: ( 01452) 396131
TIMES: 10am to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday
ADMISSION: FREE
Wheelchair access via lift, hearing loop.
The Fabulous Sound Machines website.
‘This is a new record for attendances and shows how much people like making noises! The eight sound machines are a cross between works of art and musical instruments. Unlike most works of art, these are meant to be handled and unlike most art exhibitions this one is devised to be noisy...just how noisy is up to you. Suitable for all ages from a few years to one hundred!’ The Gloucester City Museum website.
More about my piece the Kaleidochord (film, sound, pictures, text).
The exhibition is centred in a collection of mounted boxes that use light, sound and texture to introduce themes of eroticism and death that underpin the realm of the unconscious. The work aims to model and explore Freud's spatial concept of the conscious and unconscious mind - for which he used the metaphor of a house and its component rooms.
Set in a space that was previously Freud's bedroom, the exhibition is divided into two areas; the conscious and the unconscious, with a sensor standing between the two. The positioning evident in Freud's hypothesis will be reversed: the first area to be entered will be the room of consciousness, furnished to give the impression of a domestic space. The viewer is then invited to pass through a membrane into a second darkened 'unconscious' room, which houses the mounted boxes whose contents are only revealed on close inspection through small apertures.
The installation questions the way in which the thresholds between the conscious and the unconscious are negotiated and how the viewer is impelled into spaces that are simultaneously real and imaginary. It invites re-assessment of how Freud's therory has been utilised and developed within surrealism, something which will be a central theme of the accompanying one day conference, to be held on Saturday 09 October.
The artist has exhibited and published her work internationally, often within the context of surrealist group activities, notably the exhibition 'As far As My Legs Can Carry Me' at the Terezin Memorial Museum in the Czech Republic (2008).
Kathy Fox invited me to make music for a film she is displaying in the exhibition. I won't publish it until you've seen the exhibition, but meanwhile, look at another similar collaboration we did here.
Facebook-event.
26 August 2010 - 14 November 2010 (NB! Longer time!)
Kathleen Fox
The Spaces of the Unconscious
The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Henry Moore Foundation and Norwich University College of the Arts.
For further information please contact info@freud.org.uk or +44 (0)20 7435 2002
The Freud Museum London website.
The Welcome page.
Updated the 7th of September, 2010.