Ben McDonnell

I have chosen three works for the degree show. The first is an arrangement of twelve hand printed and direct-to-media glass prints hung against a graphic score. There is also a large installation thirty metres in length that has been manipulated and hung in the ceiling as well as a series of small black & white hand-printed photographs. 

The three pieces all use sound recordings that have been visualised and printed onto paper as a basis of the images. The paper is twisted and pulled, given a form. 

The installation of three columns of images is based on a recording of the first piece of music I heard, which is shot on high speed film emphasising the grain or noise inherent in film photography. The ratios of sizes of the negatives mimic ratios of the musical intervals of the first chord in this piece of music. The images are presented on a score based on the resonant frequency of the room they are hung in. The score serves as a ground for the photographs, the multiplicity of horizons in the images set against this unstable musical ground emphasise the shifting, reworking and retelling present in the piece. The same source material that was used for this piece has been further reworked into a small series of intimate black & white analogue prints in which sound has been given form and shaped into geological shapes that float groundless in the frame.

Installed in the ceiling is a sonogram of an hour of sound recording made of ambient noise in the studio it is installed in. I was keen to make site-specific work for the show as the space I was allocated happened to be the studio I had been working in for the past two years. The recording is printed onto a single roll of paper the length of which references the dimension of the circumference of the studio. It is the latest iteration of site-specific paper sound structures I have been developing over the last year.