This week I have been thinking a lot more in depth about the materials I would like to use for this sculpture/structure as they are fundamentally going to define the space, so I feel it is important to make sure they work in relation to my overall concept. It is for this reason, I have started to edge away from using such an industrial material like metal, and have begun thinking of using more natural ones....
It is in this reflection, that I have also realised that a lot of the spaces I have been looking at in relation to their acoustic qualities are spaces that were bult as sacred monuments for housing the dead. The cambered cairns are indeed tombs and the Hamilton Mausoleum is also a burial chamber, so this really made me think about these structures in relation to their context and how they exist in the world. I find it extremely interesting that these spaces house some of the most reverberant and acoustic infrastructures of any of the buildings in the world, yet their purpose serves as a resting place. It almost feels as though the people that built these spaces believed that the dead could perhaps communicate beyond death and resonate back to the living world...
I am very interested in this relation to the tombs, because originally, I had wanted to make this space like a womb, something that you entered as a reflective encounter and somewhere you could feel safe. Now I am beginning to think of how I could connected these two spaces, to construct a tomb/womb and create a limbo space in between, where one merges into the other, forming a darkness between life and death. In this darkness, the human voice would be projected, like a sound appearing from both ends, like a conversation between the living and the dead. It was when thinking about this connection between life and death that I suddenly began to envision a mass structure made of soil, of the earth itself. After all, soil is a burial material, it is something that we can clearly associate to the cycle of life; it is where humans decompose and become part of the land. I really like this link between humanity and space and I think soil is a perfect material to illustrate such a intimate relationship between our bodies and the land that we live in, realting back to my theme of 'human resonance'.
I think that the structure I want to create for the degree show will have a closer ressemblance to the cairns than I had initially imagined. I want to build a space that links closely to the process of the journey I have undertaken to create the final piece. It has also been in my reflections of the physical structure that I have started to think of how the sound will penetrate it. By using a reflective surface that the sound can bounce off on the internal wall of the structure will allow the sound to travel and create some sort of reverberation. It is through the integration of both space and sound, that makes me think I need to look at working and experimenting with several materials to make the final piece. I would like the exterior of the structure to have a very natural and organic presence, with a sense of wisdom and direct relation to the land. For the inside I would like to create a defined body, a space that feels solid and timeless, where only your presence is what exists inside of it. I have started to envision my final piece as a massive mound of earth and plants, and on the inside a chamber of concerete or cement that will form a hard and strong structure for the person to enter and resonate within. This will allow me to create a structure that reflects two different surfaces, one that looks completely ephemeral and one that looks eternal.
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