Respondents is a performance, a film and four sonic sculpture-as-scores created by Rita Evans in 2023, and supported by Canada Council for the Arts.
To introduce Respondents’ process, is to attempt to write about the emotional and instinctive labor involved in any creative journey.
A kind of optimistic grief fills me when I create. I search for interesting places to root down – and once there – to work with what’s close to the ground, sifting through the dust of previous sculptures. In there somewhere is a small radicle also heading downward, indicating the potential. To try to see and touch this rootling by placing it in the lines of your palm, is to see yourself reflected back, to imagine yourself underground.
Arrival and departure as a way of thinking and process-as-composition run through the work, creating more openings than closings, evaporations than distillations. One path leads to several, but eventually all forking paths converge back into one. Multiple versions of sculptures and parallel lines of enquiry took different routes and roots over the year of the project. My fascination with dead ends, absurdity, meandering and my perpetual curiosity of all this involves tending to and keeping going even when things fall down. Sculpting with sound and space is a field of rising and falling relationships.
I recently found out that the root of the word ecology is dwelling place. I see sculpture as a home, one that unfurls within a moving field, an expression of the field’s form.
In Respondents, seaweed in different material states was observed and embodied by both sculpture-sculptor and performer. At intervals throughout the project, I invited dancer Marguerite Galizia to the studio to move with the structures and sculpted forms as I evolved them. I responded to what happened when Marguerite applied her somatic approach to the sensory field of each of my assemblages, and I further adapted their form. This created an intimate relationship between the bodies of performer, seaweed, material, and sculptor, all within the magnetic push and pull of one another. At times it felt uncomfortable, extracting and manipulating materials away from their watery home. However what emerged was something organic and tidal in itself, a dance of participation between space, making, doing, being and reflecting, an embodiment over time that needed plenty of breathing room.
This gradual understanding resulted in choreographic objects, sculptures-as-score, that are about exploring and keeping in conversation with air, plants, algae, ground, skin and water – making space for the untranslatable. The four resulting sculptures are spaces of attention and focus, performed whilst exercising peripheral sensations of the air around them. As previous performers have said, it is not about playing them, but about being with them, moment to moment. They reflect back an internal thought and allow us to occupy it. Previous scuffs and caresses of past performers run through each iteration, as each passes hand to hand over time. The reflective qualities of the sculptures of Respondents denote a boundary and an expanse – a ‘mira’. Through the seaweed, the sea reappears.
Accompanying the work is a text by Patrick Farmer titled small as my jupiter finger. Patrick’s insights have drawn together diverse references to create a language that speaks to the works’ evolving, liquidic spatial field. Root cuttings, hologrammic fairy tales, morphing glyphs and labyrinths all participate in his sculptural text. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Patrick Farmer – small as my jupiter finger
I hope to return to all of this later in the year as we plan for a series of live public performances and film screenings.
An introduction to Respondents, by Rita Evans, 2024.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Rita is a London-based sculptor and musician. Her works have been exhibited internationally. Current projects include five sonic-sculptures commissioned by Tate Britain for children with autism and sensory difference (September 2024); an installation of sound sculptures for children at SoundLab MoMA, New York (November 2024).
Solo exhibitions include: Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, titled ‘Instrument’ at Gropius Haus as
Masterhouse Artist-in-Residence; Audiograft 2023 Performance Commission at OVADA,
Oxford; Performance commission at Towner Eastbourne titled ‘Tuning in a Vacuum’ supported by a Foundation Foundation Award for Emerging Artists; Tate St Ives, solo exhibition & performance commission titled ‘Stringing the Matrix’. Recipient of the Stephen Cripps’ Award, a major Acme Studios Residency with Royal Opera House Scenic Department, Henry Moore Foundation and Stephen Cripps’ Family, London, resulting in a series of performative sonic-sculptures played by the local community.
Recent talks and workshops include: Sound Arts BA/MA University of Arts London; Sound Arts for Harvard Graduate School Arts & Learning MA; Open School East and Royal College of Art MA Contemporary Curating, London; Bricks, Bristol as part of Working the Workshop series; Camden Arts Centre, Family Artist-in-Residence; Towner Eastbourne, Artist-In Residence titled ‘Theatre of Sound’ for children.
Marguerite Galizia is a London based dance-maker and artist-researcher at De Montfort University (Doctoral Scholarship), where she is conducting a Practice-as-Research PhD into the solo-improvisatory practice of ‘self-choreography’. Her professional practice treads the line between explicitly performative events (choreographic works, installations), and the subtler affective imprints of somatic attention scores.
Recent professional collaborations include working with visual/sound artist Rita Evans
(Respondents, 2023) and the dance-maker Amy Voris (to return, 2022). Previous work focused on the integration of interactive devices in performance. Key works include:
Total Relaxation (2016), in collaboration with electronics musician Tom Richards; Where am I? (2014), in collaboration with coder/composer Simon Katan; and the recursive video-installation This is a Square (2012).
Her work has been supported by key UK based dance agencies, including Yorkshire Dance (2017), METAL Peterborough (2016), The Place (Choreodrome 2015 & 2016), South East Dance (2014) and live@LICA (2013).
Awards include the LUTSF award (2016 & 2011), Marion North Award (BBCF, 2005) and the
Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award (2003). She trained at London Contemporary Dance School, earning an MA in Choreography (2010) and a BA (Hons.) in Contemporary Dance (2003). She is a regular member of the creative practice groups at Clarence Mews where she has led a number of Solo Practice Labs.