This light and sound work installation is a repeated experience of a singular moment in time. A video work of rain hitting water is projected onto a silk structure. The movement and sound is slowed down creating a balance of comforting and womblike and yet slightly unsettling experience.
This work plays with the importance we grant upon objects, and the fragile nature of the status.
The keys we carry in our pockets are embodied with status. Then move house, buy a new car, the keys grow old and dusty at the back of a drawer. This work explores the voice of a lost object, what would it miss? What memories would it hold? The narrative of keys allows a fleeting notion of the fragility of importance and status within the ever-changing social structure that we inhabit.
The work exists as photographs, objects, and as an installation of over 1000 keys hung from ceiling to eye hight.
Inspired by the ‘if onlys’ we each carry around with us, I advertised for volunteers to donate their regrets anonymously. The regret had to be spoken aloud, whether I was in the room, or whether it was recorded was not important, only that it was spoken. After they had spoken their regret I asked them to say the words “If only…” it was these that I have collected and used for my piece.
The soundworks create a connection others and ourselves. Most of us believe that our personal regrets are big, heavy and unique. This piece allows us a small window in to the regrets of others, the detail is not spoken, but the if onlys hold the resonance of the regret and its emotional entanglement.
I’m incredibly grateful to all the volunteers for sharing their regrets, and helping me discover that we forgive ourselves more easily for acting badly, while the deepest regrets are often those of inaction.
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Five minutes
This sound work was inspired by watching a documentary on Enola Gay, the plane responsible for dropping ‘little boy’ (the atomic bomb) on Hiroshima.
Fixated by the thought about those crucial moments in world history, while something devastating was about to happen, equally a million and one everyday moments are happening.
Every moment in our lives is shared, the most devastating moment in your life is shared with another’s most joyous.
This project started after my mother sank into a deep depression. To try and turn things around I asked her to call me every evening at 7.00pm and tell me a beautiful thing seen or experienced. This became a written record, which she eventually posted to me, but the act of searching for something beautiful became something more. It started to give her a focus, a search for beauty.
I opened this idea up and asked for volunteers to record a beautiful thing each day. Each person reported a change in their awareness and day-to-day life. At the end of the project I asked the volunteers to hand in their written text, which I turned into a negative projection. Upon entering the studio each volunteer saw their words lighting up the space, they were each photographed within their words, lit up by their own beauty.
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Debbie Adele Cooper 