‘It sounds like a legend’: Hannah Rickards at Modern Art Oxford

The new work Some people say they think it sounds like aluminium foil but to me aluminium foil is not the sound.(2014) consisted of a large screen-print of text transcribed from someone’s (all the subjects in the show blur into a general witness) description of their experience of hearing the aurora borealis: ‘it’s almost like fine breaking ice… it was so quick, in other words the sounds were so close together.’ The transcribed speech is an attempt to describe sound; ‘it’s it’s it is, it’s like maybe when you hear a whale’. The print was shaded by a green-coloured film on the skylight that gave this section of white gallery space a chlorophyllic glow. In reading the text, also in green print, our eyes became accustomed to the tinted light, so after moving into the next space the gallery light seemed to be pink. The imaginary pink ambience produced by the absence of green created an artificial aurora, a reminder of the capacity for a past event to be manifest in the present. While all colour is the product of neurological interpretation of light on our retinas, the colour pink has a particular relationship with the imaginary in that it doesn’t exist on the visual colour spectrum.⁰⁵Therefore the mediation of green-coloured light, its absence and the recorded utterances recounting a noise that may not exist all operate on a shared continuum of optical memory and fantasy.

From this initial prompt the exhibition extended to a series of investigative works that continue a dialectic of experience, description, narrative and memory. The sound that I think it makes is, is that whispering sound, to me it sounds, it almost sounds, um, uh, what’s the word I’m thinking? Um, like historic, not historic, but, um, oh: a legend, it, it sounds like a legend, you know, when you think of a legend or something way back in the past you get that, that, it sounds like that to me, like this legend or somebody’s, this whispering sound: it’s a legend. was a central work in the show, a three-screen installation from 2007 here displayed in a small triangular room installed within the larger exhibition space. Each monitor was positioned in one of the vertexes of the triangle and intermittently flashed red, blue and green (the colours of electrical waveforms that create television images) while audio recordings of a variety of speakers again attempted to define the so-called sound of the aurora. Transcriptions of the recordings, such as ‘electric’, ‘lightsaber’, ‘like-silk’, appeared out of sequence with the audio. The combination of flickering lights, snippets of text and sound played into the enclosed space confined the speakers’ rapture to a staged arrangement of technology and architecture. It is worth mentioning that there is no recorded proof that the aurora borealis produces a noise, only anecdotal evidence contributing to a sort of environmental myth. Therefore the breathless excitement with which the speakers describe their experience is charged with a need to record their version; to bring it forth from memory but also bring it into actuality. Rickards facilitates the conjuring into being of the speakers’ illusions, yet also negates that possibility, deconstructing their descriptions into a spectrum of forms and media.

No, there was no red. (2009), a twenty-minute split-screen video piece, was installed with the screens at an angle to each other, echoing the prism-shaped space. In this piece middle-aged, US speakers sit in a community centre, and collaboratively recount a vision they jointly witnessed – a mirage of a cityscape seen over the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. (Unlike the aurora sound effects, mirages over large lakes in certain conditions are frequently photographed, and are thus accountable, through the clash of hot and cold air streams channelling light reflected from city façades at an angle to the horizon.) Filmed individually or in pairs, sometimes with one shot playing across the screens, and sometimes with two pieces of footage playing simultaneously on split screens, the speakers’ descriptions of buildings, shopfronts, shapes and textures range from the abstract and sensory to specific discussions of the vista’s lack of depth and colour. The speakers often linger on points of light and on their perception of a horizontal line that organises the shapes of buildings into a composition. At times the scene sounds like a utopia, at others like an amateur watercolour. What is consistent is the group’s pursuit for the common features in each speaker’s story, whilst asserting what was distinct about the way they saw it. The level of cooperation they attempt in describing an image so unsteadily remembered is touching, suggesting the potential in communal utterance.

Caught in the midst of these transliterated events we come to terms with the shortfall of speech in relating an event that exceeds language, while also realising that the excess in verbally represented experience creates a musical noise in itself. In both The sound that I think… and No, there was no red, by reaching for a truthful depiction of the image or sound the speakers move quickly through semblances and comparisons, only to defer to alternatives. Objects, substances and sensations are evoked and quickly negated: ‘it’s like silk’, but not, ‘like sand’ or ‘it was like a crackling sound but I won’t say it’s cracking’. Here in-articulation is mobilising rather than hopeless. That speech is irregular and rarely fluent is highlighted in the transcriptions of improvised dialogue, including all the ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’, the clumsy repetitions and tortuous ‘like x and a bit like y but more like z’. To read them feels awkward and broken but when the same text is spoken it sounds natural: the lack in speech is nevertheless productive.

The musicality of loose speech relating an ungraspable moment, and the oddness of its inert score in the form of transcription, are examples of the many chains of translation occurring through this exhibition: light and heat into image, sound into score, speech into text, atmosphere into colour, experience into memory, into narrative. Such routes of translation are underlined by the audio installation, Like sand disappearing or something. (2013), which features British-accented voices re-performing lines of speech from No, there was no red. As one of the most recent works in the show it was interesting that Rickards wanted to revisit the previous work, and continue to mine it for information. While this piece has an added staged quality, its awkwardness feeds into the exhibition’s thesis on the potential for the remediation of a singular occurrence.

In the prism installation of voices lamenting the lost sound of the aurora borealis, a woman’s voice utters, “if you heard it, it’s here… it’s mine!”

What this newer installation brought in relation to the other two multi-voiced works was an added question of agency and ownership over the experiences. The Lake Michigan mirage is described in terms of the significance of each individual’s vision in contrast to the commonly agreed aspects of depth, definition and shape: ‘for me there was no red’. Many of the speakers seem to desire a unique relationship with the event, or at least a unique access to a mode of description that clinches what it was actually like. In the prism installation of voices lamenting the lost sound of the aurora borealis, a woman’s voice utters, ‘if you heard it, it’s here… it’s mine!’ This wonderful claim over the sound by way of having heard it is complicated by Rickards’s repossession of the experience. This absorption of singular voices suggests that there is a kind of economy of information harvested by the exhibition. Another says, ‘That’s about as close as I can come, so if that’s going to help you at all’, and it dawns on you that all the descriptions are an offering to the artist that she has then appropriated. This prompts the question of what is a shared perception: are these collated stories collective or solitary experiences, and do Rickards’s iterations make them more or less so?

If metaphor is the carrying-over of meaning from one form to another, then this exhibition features a constellation of extended metaphors. Rickards’s work replaces objects, sounds, forms and experiences with looser, abstract versions of the ‘original’, generating meaning from what was replaced. In the same way that the absence of green light can give way to an experience of pink (therefore revealing significance about the colour green), the sound of thunder is replaced by the sound of an orchestra, producing an analysis of thunder in its absence. In the verbally centred works, spatial metaphors (angles and light) are used to carry over information from the reiterations. Rickards locates the point in each testimony that can be linked to a physical representation of the natural phenomena, and shows us that the failure to accurately reanimate a subjective memory is far from futile.