Catriona Soutar,

Education Projects Facilitator

Sounding silence

My research has evolved out of experiments in removing sight or sound, and an interest in how the senses overlap and inform each other. As a hearing aid user, the small background noises that fill the studio make a big impression and shape my experience of the space.

Both gallery and classroom-based learning can emphasise the visual to the exclusion of other senses. Through this research I have reflected on my learning experience and the impact of hearing loss on education and museum / gallery spaces. While doing the extra work of filtering sound, lip-reading, and responding to body language and other cues for communication can be a challenge, it can also be an opportunity to engage creatively with an awareness of how the senses work together.

Finding ways to capture the studio soundscape has led me to explore layering, overlapping and collaging sound and video, drawing on my experience of using captions and subtitles to support or change understanding. My research investigates how language can communicate the experience of exaggerated, amplified and mediated sound, and what happens to written words when they are absorbed into a different space and medium.

The words you will see and sounds you will hear reflect my choices – but I hope there is space for you to consider your own experience too. Sound can be a matter of comfort or distress, information or confusion, but often stays hidden underneath articulated experience in the learning sphere or gallery space. I hope to bring some of this process into the foreground and invite you to consider not just the words and sounds you would choose, but what it feels like to witness, name or label them.

This piece takes place within an enclosed space and in darkness – stay for as long or as little time as you feel comfortable.