Nakagin Pod Tower, an introduction to architectural model making, Nottingham Trent University 2024

This workshop is an introduced some basic model making principles; clean glue, scalpel usage, working to scale, and producing accurate results.

The basis for this session is centred on the Japanese Nakagin Capsule pod tower, where participants learn some fundamental model making techniques to produce the Capsule components of this famous piece of architecture.

The photos show students adding their own made capsule pods to the central Nakagin tower structure.

Voyage of Maeldune workshop, The Collection, Lincoln 2022

Excerpt from The Voyage of Maeldune

III.

And we came to the Silent Isle that we never had touch’d at before,
Where a silent ocean always broke on a silent shore,
And the brooks glitter’d on in the light without sound, and the long waterfall,
Pour’d in a thunderless plunge to the base of the mountain walls,
And the poplar and cypress unshaken by storm flourish’d up beyond sight,
And the pine shot aloft from the crag to an unbelievable height,
And high in the heaven above it there flicker’d a songless lark,
And the cock couldn’t crow, and the bull couldn’t low, and the dog couldn’t bark.
And round it we went, and thro’ it, but never a murmur, a breath—
It was all of it fair as life, it was all of it quiet as death,
And we hated the beautiful Isle, for whenever we strove to speak
Our voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse-shriek;
And the men that were mighty of tongue and could raise such a battle-cry
That a hundred who heard it would rush on a thousand lances and die—
O they to be dumb’d by the charm!—so fluster’d with anger were they
They almost fell on each other; but after we sail’d away.

IV.

And we carne to the Isle of Shouting, we landed, a score of wild birds
Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words;
Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices peal’d
The steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died from the field,
And the men dropt dead in the valleys and half of the cattle went lame,
And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke into flame;
And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my crew,
Till they shouted along with the shouting and seized one another and slew;
But I drew them the one from the other; I saw that we could not stay,
And we left the dead to the birds and we sail’d with our wounded away.

As part of the Bummock: Tennyson Research Centre Symposium I was asked to deliver a workshop with Tennyson as a central theme. I encountered Tennyson’s version of the Irish fable ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ and was drawn to how the poem is rich in themes of listening and hearing, particularly within verses referring to the “Silent Isle” and the “Isle of Shouting”. During the workshop participants experienced environments using impaired listening techniques to draw parallels with the poem’ss themes.

I made a short audio recording of all the listening exercises and played these back to the participants in a quite space to exemplify the immense amount of sound that we are able to block out in our daily lives.

The second part of the workshop was conducted using a MAX patch specially made to layer soundbites of ambient sound in cycles. The participants were required to whisper to each other with ear defenders on until the MAX software had completed enough cycles to make the recording indecipherable.

The workshop extended into in depth discussions around sound environments and their effects they have on our experience of place, our understanding of our surroundings, and how we navigate the world.

A landscape Exhibition soundtrack and experimental Film workshop, PSP Lincoln, 2015

During 2015 I curated an exhibition the challenged the idea of the exhibtion/gallery experience and the legacy of artwork as a resource. I have an ongoing practice using prepared musical instruments, and I enjoy the endless combination and arrangements that could be achieved, and certainly the output of this process. At the time of this exhibition I was particularly interested in how this translated within an art setting, and wanted to examine the art object’s regenerative purpose.

I conducted a workshop with a group of fine art students and the general public using the artwork in the space to generate a short film that was later screened as part of an Arts Council England funded film screening program.

In the morning participants created film footage using analogue filming techniques and, improvised film rigging, and in the afternoon the footage was compiled along with the sound recordings to form an experimental landscape themed film. All processes utilised the exhibition and the artworks within it as subject for film or percussive instruments.

 Mulch field recording workshop, various locations, 2015

Mulch, a project that explored to interplay of sounds and significance of perspective, took from of portable installations housing interactive modular speaker systems. Coupled with a series of field recording workshops, these installations acted as on site listening booths where multiple sounds could be listened to simultaneously.

This work was formed in collaboration with digital artists James Hubble and installation artist Rob Britt.

During the project I developed the hardware for the sound installation as well as facilitating field recording workshops. The premise behind these workshops was to examine the sonic building blocks of an environment by manually overlapping recordings and making decisions about where they occur in reference to the perspective of the human body.

The project saw such playful experimentation as situating airplane recordings below the feet, amplifying sounds of insects above all other sounds, and combining multiple perspectives on an environment with the confinements of the listening booth.