Making The Trent Valley Cabinet of Curiosities
Siobhan McAleer and the OLGBT+ group and friends
secret messages & hidden heritages - developing a language of the river
Artist Siobhan McAleer was interested in exploring the idea of the languages of the river. Exploring markings that people may leave along the river - to send messages, give warnings, or mark places that have special meaning to them.
She also explored what people may say to a river and what they might hear - if we had a sound recording device that could capture all the sounds that had ever been heard by the River Trent what sort of things would we hear?
Asemic writing and graphic scores
Over the summer Siobhan worked with members of the LGBTQ+ community and friends to explore river markings and design new Asemic writing and letters/characters inspired by the River Trent.
She was joined by musician Mary Keith - who shared music composed in response to rivers.
Mary then led the group in exploring sound-making in response to the qualities of the River Trent and introduced the group to visual or graphic scores as a more experimental way of ‘reading’ music. The group then created and recorded sounds using the Asemic writing they had made in previous workshops.
Siobhan has programmed a Raspberry Pi to be ‘The Voice of the river’. The Raspberry pi - sits within the cabinet, attached to a listening and speaking device. The rivers ‘voice’ in river ‘language’ is made up of the recordings made during the summer. Using the idea of ‘tin can telephone’ the listening/ speaking device are two Staffordshire made ceramic cups - featuring a river design of course!
Using Python Siobhan has made it so that each element of sound from the summer recordings has been input into an especially designed program that then combines them together, depending on the length, volume, and tempo of the input to make a unique river response for each participant.
Visitors to the cabinet will be able to speak a message, tell a story, share a secret, a hope or their own piece of lore into the river in one cup - and then hear the river’s response in the other!
Listening technology - old and new
The River Scroll
Siobhan wanted to include the beautiful Asemic writing that the group had made into the cabinet too, and has made a textile scroll, that is a representation of the river. Focusing on the abstract elements of the river, such as colour and movement Siobhan has made textile representation including the Asemic writing by the participants transposed to textiles. This also becomes representative of a graphic score. Which in turn mimics the river. A graphic score is a way of writing music that uses no particular conventional notation, and so can never be played exactly the same way twice. Just as the river is never the same in its flow.
To make the river score, Siobhan used a water soluble interfacing, and free machine embroidery.
This project has been commissioned by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, as part of the Trent Valley Past and Present Project. It is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery players.
Find out more about the wider project here: https://www.thetrentvalley.org.uk/projects/tvpp/
