Cave Paintings
2025
Candles, organza, 3-channel audio loop, duration 8:10
Cave Paintings is a site-specific sound installation developed and realised during my residency at Open Ateliers Zuidoost, Amsterdam, in summer 2025. I began by listening to the sound of empty concrete rooms, while thinking about an ancient bar joke that had lost its context. Bringing together my interests in sound, language, humour and the absurd, I worked out a script partly shaped by what I heard echoing through the space. As the words came together and were spoken out loud, I sensed them as though in a cave, perhaps containing echos of prehistoric culture. Eventually voices started emerging from the dark, following surreal narrative episodes framed by recurring versions of the same basic bar joke.
This work reflects my developing interest in the potential of sound in spaces with an absence of light.
Installation excerpt: Open Ateliers Zuidoost, Amsterdam, August 2025
A short period of ecologic and anthropic turbulence
2024
Indian ink on polyester fabric, 200 x 140 cm each, stereo audio loop, duration 5:32
A voice promotes the idea of raising the dodo from extinction, glorifying human progress which has already derailed itself. Queasy words float around fantastical images of the birds, based on unreliable eyewitness drawings made during the short period when they coexisted with humans.
The dodo is perhaps the best-known extinct species, disappearing soon after its discovery in the 17th century. Current attempts to resurrect it via genetic technologies are a mirage, based on splicing dodo and chicken DNA to produce chimeras which have never before existed. They are driven by the same destructive logic of progress that wiped out the dodo.
A short period of ecologic and anthropic turbulence turns these machinations into a quasi-altarpiece to the absurdity of faith in endless growth.
Installation excerpt: Still Life, Westergas, Amsterdam, November 2024
Unknown Number
2021
Cotton enclosure, stereo audio loop, duration 22:35
Unknown Number is set in a telemarketing call centre without boundaries. It is an inexhaustible system, inhuman yet made by/of humans, repeating itself to infinity but always on the edge of collapse under its own absurdities.
Over five ‘episodes’, Unknown Number dives into the opaque structures lying behind junk phone calls. My own early experience working as a cold-caller in the late 1990s serves as a point of contrast to trace the overheated, wildly unequal ‘progress’ that has taken place since then. Last century’s visions of leisure and abundance, courtesy of the machines, remain far out of reach for most; while the machines themselves may (already have) become our masters. Given the technological potential, how has the dream unravelled? Why is there such a persistence of ‘bullshit jobs’, the very labour we were supposed to be liberated from?
This work is set up inside a fabric enclosure providing only partial screening from the large open corridor in front of it. By bringing external surroundings into the usually private space of a phone call, listeners are invited to a heightened awareness of how effectively sound can be used to further capitalism’s drive towards totality.
The shadow of your dog
2018
4-channel audio loop, duration 16:30
Where is the emotional weight of a song located? How does it engage in pathos? This is a song that listens, lets the body take over, and sings with what Roland Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice, or ‘the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue’.
The shadow of your dog is an immersive ‘song’, in which I explore the potential for emotional communication using non-linguistic voice.
Updated November 2025
