voice

Henry Moore Foundation research grant by Olivia Louvel

Happy and grateful to have been awarded by the Henry Moore Foundation a grant allowing me to travel to remote Iceland and conduct research on and inside Lukas Kühne’s sculpture for one month, Spring 2023.

Located on the Iceland's east coast, 'Tvisöngur' (2012) is a site-specific concrete sculpture tuned to react to certain pitches. The aim is to explore corporeality in our experience of sculpture, and the notion of the inside of sculpture as Kühne's sculpture can be entered. This on-site research sits within my thesis 'On the interplay of voice and sculpture: a hybrid encounter' whose purpose is to understand through a cross-disciplinary approach their intrinsic relationship. Voice and sculpture, when do they connect? Who actively participates in their interplay?

The plinth is long gone, so is representational endeavour. In the 20th century, sculpture has expanded from solid, time and weather enduring, to fragile, ephemeral, biodegradable and even anti-sculptural. Sculpture is carved, cast, built, or not when found as ready-made to exhibit, it is stacked, disintegrated, exploded, and re-assembled. Sculpture in the twenty-first century is indeed “unlimited” as asserted by sculptor Eva Grubinger and curator Jörg Heiser (2011). This statement is preceded by Rosalind Krauss’s seminal article on the expanded field of sculpture in which she concludes that sculpture is now a category that results from the combination of exclusion: if it is neither a landscape, nor architecture, then it is sculpture. Lukas Kühne’s sculpture certainly sits within that field. Kühne states that Tvisöngur becomes a sculpture of singing concrete and explains how the sculpture is built of concrete and consists of five interconnected domes of different sizes. Each dome has its own resonance that corresponds to a tone in the Icelandic musical tradition of five tone harmony and works as a natural amplifier to that tone.

Very often sculpture is looked at, as a three-dimensional shape we can circle. Barbara Hepworth notably invited to touch sculpture and use our own body. “I think every person looking at a sculpture should use his own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ram rod and stare at it, with as sculpture you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it and walk away from it.” But how often do we get to enter sculpture? What is at play here with the on-site research I wish to conduct in Iceland is the corporeality of sculpture, how our body as experiencers interact with the sculpture for a whole sensorium experience from within, from the inside. With corporeality, the voice is in reach and at play as embodied, the voice is a tool of perception and experience of Kühne’s sculpture.

The Sculptor Speaks [Hepworth Resounds] 1961 to 2020 by Olivia Louvel

After having been poorly (I’m often ill in November), I am now back working on resounding the tape, running behind the train! The Sculptor Speaks is a resounding of a 1961 recording of Barbara Hepworth’s voice, shining a singular light on her creative process. I am enjoying every moment of it. Yesterday I extended a section, giving space to the words, which can appear at times too omnipresent.

“I am the figure in the landscape….a new sculpture… “ silence and repeat…

The question is how far do I abstract the words? The message conveyed needs to be clear and transmitted but then I want the voice to become abstract at times. I need to feel free. This is a constant negotiation.

The Sculptor Speaks will be broadcast in its version 1.0 on Resonance FM 10th of January 2020 (This first transmission celebrates her date of birth). Version 1.0 because it will be a stereo mix for the radio format; version 2.0 will be experienced physically in a space. I am currently studying for a Master’s degree at the DMSA, University of Brighton. The work on the tape forms the basis for my research, investigating the voice from preservation to resounding whilst taking further the voice of Hepworth into the physical space as a multi-speaker diffusion.

Recorded by Hepworth herself in her studio in St Ives, the tape’s initial purpose was for a recorded talk with slides for the British Council (original duration 32 mins). Recently I contacted the British Library to obtain further details on the original tape, I will share these findings with you soon… O