I will begin by describing a moment I had a few days after finishing the show at Glasgow, while on a road trip with Richard Demarco which traced the historic journey that Joseph Beuys made to Rannoch Moor and Oban.

“I am standing right on the edge of the pier at Inverary, looking out across a sea loch at dusk. It seems at first view of permanence. Looking down, I see a world in motion, the solid ground replaced by the endlessly moving, reflecting surface of the water. I look across at the hills, formed once by massive volcanic activity, glaciers, millions of years of weather erosion, still eroding. I consider the movement of tectonic plates, discussed usually in lessons of how this country was formed. Yet still they are moving, separating, joining, creating fissures, oceans and mountain ranges. The wavelets beneath my feet lend to this contemplation of geological time their sense of movement, of time sped up, the whole earth forming and deforming, a constant flux. And then, imagining myself transported in time to this very spot before the earth itself were formed, I wonder would this spot even exist, or be contracted to non-existence? I wonder how these waves would look a few seconds ago, or tomorrow. I imagine myself standing upon the loch floor, looking up at the surface movements, not down upon them. I imagine myself looking down from the moon, or looking at the water surface from two inches away. Were I, at this very moment, even to be transported to the other side of the loch, everything would be changed, my experience of this moment changed quite completely. Surveying the scene I perceive, it is just one view of constant movement, and all I can take from it are a flow of momentary perspectives among an infinite number. A complex sampling of an impossibly large total reality. As the number of perceptions and possible perceptions begin to flood in, of an eternity of time, an infinitely varied dynamic of movement, infinite possible perspectives, any ability I might have to process them is overwhelmed. I become quite dizzy with a kind of psychological motion sickness, and turn away.”

What is happening here? It is neither a purely objective, nor a purely subjective experience. It is certainly not transcendent; there is no other place reached here, just a dizzying and overwhelming onslaught of thought, memory, imagination and actual perception upon my consciousness.  On one level it represents a kind of oscillation between the subjective and objective, between the imagination and the world of matter.  It is observational, but equally it is a dynamic interplay of thought, memory, imagination and knowledge. It is from this dynamic that creative thought emerges. But it is also an essentially failed attempt to penetrate the flux of fluid reality. It is a failure, because in perception I cannot grasp the thing itself, because the thing in itself is impossibly large, impossibly fluid, and ungraspable. And if perception fails, what chance does art have? In this sense, I must describe all my work as a catalogue of failure, of death.

But, returning to the moving image vs the static image in a work of art, the first point to make is that the moving image never shows us reality, even in the most apparently ‘real’ of images. To choose a slice of temporal reality, frame a shot, record it, present it – all of this is a profound abstraction of a moment of perceived time and reality. It is as illusory in itself as the most abstract of abstract works of art. But, perhaps more profoundly, moving image art deals with movement and with duration. It is this aspect,  in its inherent fluidity, that it comes closer to philosophical truth, for me at least, than any fixed image ever can. A painting for instance, can contain duration in its creation, but the moment it is finished, it appears as a fixed image, and fixed idea, and it begins to die. Its temporal dynamism is no longer situated in the medium of the work itself, but transferred, more or less successfully, to the subjective experience of the viewer. The most interesting thing for me, for example, about Malevich’s black square is not its fixed conceptual significance (supposedly containing at once the negation and immanence of everything), but its element of actual duration, the way in which the paint on this fixed image of an idea has degraded over the nearly 100 years since it was painted. It is now no longer a flat black square, but has become dynamic image of degrading, cracking blackness. Nothing wants to be fixed in time.

So, I believe the moving image comes closer to reflecting the duration, fluidity and dynamism of life. It still fails, but it comes closer. But the fact of its fluidity challenges the way we are used to looking at art and as such, becomes problematic. A fixed image invites an entering into a fixed idea, a fossilized sample that can be looked at again and again with the same result, or even with deepening engagement, but always centered around a fixed point. In a contemporary context, this is something audiences and curators want from art. We want to ‘get it’, to understand the fixed point, the idea, the concept. We are more comfortable and satisfied with work we can intellectually grasp, work we can fix, frame and contain within our cultural context. But all of these fixed concepts represent only lifelessness. Moving image art has the potentiality of fluidity, a potentiality to contain within its form a multiplicity of perspectives, a fluidity of ideas and a life of dynamic concepts.

However, I must admit this potentiality is often both problematic and unrealized within a contemporary art context. The deathly characteristic of the fixed concept is still prevalent in much of the more acclaimed moving image art we see today. Many moving image works are celebrated for their slight, banal, singular ideas, or even their very emptiness. My argument moves against this trend, toward a celebration of complexity and fluidity of idea, form and concept that truly honours the medium.  I shall end this post with a quote from Gilles Deleuze:

“The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future, the inside and the outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent of any fixed point.”

“My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone:

Thinking Forms – the way in which we mould our thoughts

Spoken Forms – how we shape our thoughts into words or

Social Sculpture – how we mould and shape the world in which we live.” [i]

I read this book during my summer holidays, before the start of my final year at art school in Glasgow. It had a profound effect on me. At the time, I was listening to more and more ‘experimental’ music, excited by the way in which improvised music could be seen as model for a way of being in the world. I was consumed with idealistic theories of how art could change the world, and Beuys’ ideas of Social Sculpture rang true with my feelings at the time. I was also listening to a lot of folk music both from close to home and from around the world, realising how many different ways of singing there are on our planet, and how these songs are somehow portraits of the individuals as well as of the particular culture from which they come. That same year I had started to perform with my then new band ‘Nalle’, exploring the freedom that improvisation permits within the structure of more traditional song forms. What struck me whilst reading, listening, and playing was the relationship between Beuys’ ideas of sculpture moulded from invisible materials and the possibility of understanding singing as a sculptural process.

To sing is very physical process. Sound, though transient and immaterial, is a physical medium. It has a measurable volume, width, length and tempo. It exists as a physical energy, as sound waves moving through space and responding to space in particular ways. When I sing loudly I can feel the vibrations of the sound I am creating from my body. I can mould them by changing the amount of air I use and the shape of my mouth.

“… there is absolutely no possibility for a human being…. to express himself to someone else except through a material process. Even when I speak I use my larynx, bones, sound waves, for instance, and I need the substance of air…. There’s no possibility of conveying one’s meaning except through imprinting it in a particular material. And for some things less solid materials are needed than for others. But basically it’s the same thing whether I speak or combine pieces of iron and thus create an object.”[ii]

If indeed, sculptural forms can be shaped from our thoughts into words using the spoken voice, can we therefore, also understand song to be a sculptural form moulded from the singing voice? This process begins with listening and finds expression using the tongue, the larynx, air, sound waves and the ear of the listener as materials. In this way, the composition of song can be understood as a sculptural process that finds expression using the materials of the body. It therefore follows, that sound making and song naturally function as portraits of the self. Song Sculpture can thus be defined as the way in which we shape our feelings and thoughts into song.

Using my voice as well as the voices of others, I have worked with these ideas in a number of projects. Pollokshaws Song Portrait(Glasgow 2006), Kensington Cradle Songs (Liverpool 2007) and Abbeyview Note Catcher (Dunfermline 2008), bring together voices from diverse groups of people where recordings of songs and/or vocal sounds function as sculptural materials to create portraits. Airs of the Sea (Cromarty 2006), is a composition replicating the sounds of the sea, sculpted from the recordings of 100 different people’s breath. Salutation to the Sun (2006) also imitates a soundscape from the natural world; in this instance an entire dawn chorus is sculpted from a single voice. The projects experiment with dissolving language and structure, inviting the participant and/or listener to become absorbed in the merging of different layers of sound.

I use my voice as a material to compose and improvise, both alone and with other musicians. With the band Nalle I seek to explore the constituent elements of the voice within more traditional musical forms. I regard my own songs and performances as self-portraits of my personal experiences.

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