I want to begin with the fact that Duologue is a collaboration.It was made with the artist Martin Darbyshire, and the work began very simply. We stood together in the entrance to St John’s Church in Waterloo. We started recording at the same moment. Then we went in different directions.

 

One of us went inside the church, into the service. The other went outside, into the churchyard and the surrounding streets. We walked, listened and recorded for more than twenty minutes before meeting again at the same entrance. What emerged from that simple action was Duologue.

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For me, the important thing is that this isn't simply two sound recordings put together. The work exists through the relationship between two artists, two practices and two ways of listening. We don't occupy the same space, but we occupy the same time. We are making two different recordings of the same moment. That simultaneity became important.

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Inside the church there is a particular kind of power. There is architecture, ritual, religion, preaching, reading, singing and music. The building itself produces an acoustic. Voices are amplified and given authority by the space.

 

Outside, there is another kind of life. There are people walking, talking, pigeons, trees, buses, helicopters, footsteps and all of those sounds that we usually don't pay much attention to. And I became interested in that contrast, but also in questioning the contrast. Because the outside isn't simply ordinary and the inside isn't simply extraordinary. They are both constructed spaces, and both contain multiple voices.

 

The work begins with a distinction between inside and outside, but gradually makes that distinction unstable. That is much more interesting. The church's institutional voice is surrounded by the sounds of everyday life; the everyday world outside is itself full of forms of organisation, movement and power. The sound piece makes them occupy the same temporal and acoustic field.

 

This connects to an idea that has become increasingly important in my work: the infraordinary — the attempt to pay attention to the things that are normally overlooked because they are too familiar, too everyday, too insignificant. A pigeon becomes important. A bus passing becomes important. Someone talking as they walk becomes important. A footstep becomes important. Not because these things are extraordinary, but because listening carefully allows us to encounter the ordinary differently.

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And that brings me to space and place. St John’s is not simply a location in which we placed a sound work. The place produced the work. The architecture of the church, the churchyard, Waterloo Road, the people moving through the area, the traffic, the birds, the congregation — all of these things became part of the material.

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So for me the work is also about the relationship between the human and the non-human. We tend to think of a sound recording as recording something that a human has done — somebody speaking, singing or playing music.

 

But the work also contains things that aren't human voices. Wind. Birds. Trees. Traffic. Aircraft. Architecture itself. The acoustic resonance of the church. These things become voices too.

 

And this is where the title of the exhibition, ‘Now I make a leaf of Voices', becomes particularly interesting to me. The title comes from Walt Whitman's Voices, from Leaves of Grass, and the exhibition describes Whitman's poem as celebrating polyphony and plurality. 

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I think Duologue operates in that space of plurality. It is not really a dialogue between two people. It begins as a dialogue between two artists, but then it expands. There is the voice of the church. The voice of the congregation. The voice of the city. The voice of the passer-by. The voice of the bird. The voice of the traffic. And perhaps the voice of the building itself.

 

So why do I think this is sculpture?

My practice has increasingly been concerned with sculpture as performance and performance as sculpture. I'm interested in sculpture not simply as an object that occupies space, but as something that can construct relationships between bodies, materials, actions, time and place.

 

Duologue doesn't give you a traditional sculptural object. Instead, it constructs a spatial and temporal experience. Its material is sound.

Its form is movement. Its structure is the relationship between two artists moving through a place. And its volume is the space that those sounds occupy. In that sense, I think of Duologue as a kind of invisible sculpture. It is something that you enter rather than simply look at.

 

And perhaps that is why it belongs within a sculpture exhibition. Because sculpture can be material, but it can also be relational. It can be temporal.

It can be embodied. It can be something that changes our awareness of where we are.

 

For me, Duologue is ultimately about listening to a place — but also about recognising that a place is never one voice. It is always many voices happening simultaneously. And perhaps that is the real sculpture: not the sound itself, but the relationship between all of those voices.