I spent this morning in the recording studio with David, editing the draft version of the sound piece. It was wonderful to hear the different layers of sound that David had built into the work, and the creative ways in which he was using the recordings we had made on site.
The photograph of David’s computer screen below gives a visual score for the layering of sound in the piece. The top layers represent the three voices in the project – mine and the two participants – ; the layers beneath represent the resonances of the Angel, which run throughout the piece, and the sounds of the traffic and the wind; and the lower levels are the sounds of birdsong, leaves in the trees, and grass whispering in the wind.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The addition of the field recordings to the recorded voices gives the words of the participants additional resonance, as David marked the moments in the conversations when they had made reference to weather or particular sounds, and enhanced them through recorded sound. The work is divided into four sections, corresponding to the seasons, and David used the contact microphone recording of the interior of The Angel for the relevant season. Listening to them in sequence, it was remarkable how much the vibrations from The Angel differed in tone across the year, with the winter recordings shaped by the violent wind and rain of the storms, and the summer recordings more vibrant and lively, capturing the muffled sounds of children playing and visitors chatting nearby.
The sound piece also captures a few memorable moments of the field recordings. From our summer visit to The Angel, David built in the song of the blackbird that I recorded singing from the top of a tree in the copse, as well as my recording of my own footsteps. The geophone captured the boom of The Angel contracting, and David used the sound to punctuate the sections of the work, like the regular tolling of a bell. David’s visit to The Angel to record during Storm Babet produced the echoing of the raindrops from the surface of the sculpture that can be heard in the Winter section of the piece.
The continual drone of The Angel (shown in pink above) reminded me of David’s recordings of the pithead at Easington Colliery, in its haunting evocation of the former mining communities. In our sound piece, it accompanies (and expands) the participants’ associations of The Angel sculpture with the mineworkers who had toiled beneath.
The sound piece will be installed in The Arches on the main campus at Newcastle University on Monday 1 July and will play from 1-7 July.
If you walk into Leeds City Art Gallery, a life-size brick sculpture of a man stands directly in front of you. This is the maquette for The Brick Man, a monumental sculpture by Antony Gormley that was never realised but that is now widely seen as an important precursor for The Angel of the North. Gormley proposed the sculpture in 1988 for the Holbeck area of Leeds, where it would have stood over 30 metres high on land surrounded by railway lines, and greeted travellers arriving at Leeds station. (The Angel now stands 20 metres high, surrounded by roads and welcoming drivers into Gateshead.) The brick construction of the proposed sculpture referenced the brickworks that had formerly occupied the Holbeck site, which was derelict wasteland by 1988. The Brick Man would thereby have materialised the industrial heritage of the area of Leeds for which it was designed, a full decade before The Angel commemorated the colliery that occupied the Gateshead site on which it now stands.
If you walk round the maquette of The Brick Man to look at the back, a small doorway is visible in one of its heels. Here, visitors would have entered to gaze up at the hollow interior of the sculpture and take in its height and scale. Once inside the structure, visitors would have had the opportunity to climb a staircase, which led up to windows in the man’s ears; from here, visitors could take in the view of the city that the high vantage point afforded. Gormley abandoned this access to the sculpture’s interior for his design of The Angel a decade later; it is nevertheless a helpful reminder of how important the hollow interior of his sculptures was for Gormley at this time.
Gormley’s extensive study of Buddhism and meditation had given him a long-standing interest in the human body as it is experienced from the inside. His sculptural figures are typically moulds of the human form, which often use his own body as the model. The sculptures as moulds or ‘body cases’ have an empty space within, which Gormley has linked to the meditation that he practices while the mould is being made. He describes the experience of being encased in plaster in this way:
In the moulding process I have to be very still and to be breathing regularly. I have to try not to think about the outside and to be completely concentrated on the space that exists behind appearance. At first this experience is very claustrophobic. . . . As the plaster goes on and I am enclosed ever more deeply in a damp, dark, soft enclosure, there is a descent into the darkness of the body. This is the space that we all spend our lives escaping from, but it is also the place of imagination: a place that starts with feelings of claustrophobia but opens into an extension as wide as a sky at night. (‘Feeling into Form’, p. 1518)
Gormley’s sculptures arise out of meditation and invite their viewers to use the work as a means for their own reflection. In The Brick Man, the proposed encounter with the interior ‘darkness of the body’ was literal, with the visitor entering the sculpture’s internal space. Although The Angel can only be viewed externally, it works on the same principles as Gormley’s other work of this period, its stance and hollow interior asking the viewer to participate in the meditative state that is, for the artist, the origin of all his work.
The location of the sculpture also contributes to the meditative feeling that Gormley seeks to evoke. The Brick Man and The Angel were both designed to represent still centres in environments where people routinely rush past, whether by rail or by car. Gormley has written of the placing of his works:
I guess we then have to ask how these works fit into the world and how they can evoke or identify a feeling in space, how in a time of extreme visual cacophony in the built environment do we use the space of sculpture to reinforce the self in this confused and commercialized world? As we walk down the street, our attention is constantly bombarded with bright new goods in the shop windows, a man trying to evangelize with a microphone in the centre of the street, brief glimpses of the weather, a cloudless sky, an impending storm, large advertisements, the ringing and talking in mobile phones. In this distracting and distracted world, so lacking in cohesion, how do we insert sculpture as both a point of symbolized self in the world and a place for self in the world, a place that is silent, still, removed? (‘Feeling into Form’, pp. 1513-14)
Gormley thinks of sculpture as something that is not only itself still and unmoving, but that can be deliberately placed in a hectic urban environment to create a space of stillness and reflection for its visitors. Although his example is a high street, it readily transfers to the busy roads that surround The Angel. Those who are driving past on the A1 can pause their journey to find a place that feels ‘still’ and ‘removed’. It is instructive, too, to think about the language that Gormley uses here – even as he thinks about the visual, he turns to the auditory to make his point, speaking about ‘cacophony’, the man with the microphone, and the constant background chatter of the mobile phone. The feeling that sculpture evokes not only stills movement; it also quietens noise.
When I was standing at the feet of The Angel this morning, there was a loud thump above me, followed by a reverberation down the body of The Angel that passed through the ground to me, rising through my feet and up my body. My first thought was that a bird had flown into one of The Angel’s wings and that the sound was caused by the impact, but I could see no sign of any collision. I concluded that the warm sun heating the metal after the recent freezing temperatures had caused it to expand, producing the booming noise that I both heard and felt. This encounter with The Angel’s sound acted as a forceful reminder of its hollow interior, which shaped the deep reverberation that resonated through my own body.
The incident caused me to reflect on what it means to sound The Angel in our project. It reminded me to be wary of any claim that David and I are uniquely able to reveal The Angel’s sound through technology, when a combination of atmospheric conditions and sculptural form had produced such a deeply resonant noise. It also cautioned me against using language such as ‘the voice’ of The Angel, because we are neither making The Angel speak, nor adding its noise to the nearby cacophony of traffic. What we are capturing instead is the echo of The Angel’s surroundings as they reverberate through its hollow structure – whether that is the sound of the traffic, of wind, or of rain. This takes us closer to Gormley’s own interest in the interior of his sculptures as a space of encounter and imagination. I am reminded of the visitors who recently listened through David’s headphones to The Angel’s resonances and observed that the noise sounded like something you could either meditate to, or compose with. The sounds that David is recording retain the sense of stillness that Gormley associates with sculptural form, giving us an entry point into imagining the interior of The Angel, the hollow space that was so central to Gormley’s artwork of this period. Instead of walking into the structure and peering up into its shadowy interior, sound can evoke its elusive inner form for us through echo and vibration.
In the placing of The Brick Man and The Angel, the historical resonance of the site was key, informing both the form and the material of the sculpture. Situated on abandoned post-industrial wasteland, sculpture aimed to reclaim it as a place – an artistic practice that was tied to policies of urban regeneration, but also extended beyond this to create a site of pause and reflection. Speaking about the relation between art and spirituality at Durham Cathedral in 1996, Gormley reflected on the spiritual role of sculpture in a secular society, observing:
I am interested in reviving [the] idea of presence. Can we have presence without the God? Can we resurrect the monument without bringing the shadow of bad history? The idea of an image that is open enough to be interpreted widely, that has multiple and generative potential for meaning but is strong enough to be a focus. How can we construct such an image? In being someone’s can it be everyone’s? (‘Art and Spirituality’, p. 156)
The Angel manifests as one potential solution to Gormley’s questions: a symbol that is open to interpretation, and a powerful focal point; an image that references religion, but holds a broad spiritual resonance. The grassroots memorial that has emerged at the site suggests that The Angel has taken on the kind of ‘presence’ that Gormley was interested in, becoming a place of spiritual significance in a predominantly secular time.
Gormley’s statement about the Angel that has been placed on site refers to the mound on which the sculpture stands as a significant factor in its effect. He says: ‘The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound’. In addition to the historical resonance of the mine beneath, the positioning of the sculpture on the raised ground evokes a sense of neolithic monuments. Driving past The Angel and viewing it from the A1 has something of the effect of seeing Stonehenge rising in the distance across Salisbury Plain. The approach to The Angel on foot entails walking up the mound towards it, and then standing beneath its towering form. Visitors often reach out to touch The Angel as they would the stone of a megalith. I have written in previous posts about the trees of the memorial feeling like an ancient grove, and the tying of ribbons to the trees resembling Celtic traditions and beliefs. There is, then, a discernible continuity between the ancient spiritual resonances that Gormley evoked in his design of The Angel and the grassroots memorial practices that have more recently emerged at the site.
References
Antony Gormley, ‘Art and Spirituality’, Address at a conference in Durham Cathedral, October 1996. Reproduced in John Hutchinson, E. H. Gombrich, Lela B. Njatin and W. J. T. Mitchell, Antony Gormley (London and New York: Phaidon, 2000), pp. 154-56.
Antony Gormley, ‘Feeling into form’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362.2132 (2007), pp. 1513-18.
My second visit to The Angel with David took place on a very windy day. As I arrived, David emerged from the memorial in the trees, having made a short recording of the wind in the leaves. I entered the trees and took a few minutes to listen to the dry rustle as their branches waved above me, a sound that I strongly associate with this place. String had been threaded between two alder trees and packages filled with inscribed hearts were pegged to it, which spun and twisted in the air as the wind caught them.
Once we reached The Angel, David took out his new contact microphone, which he was able to clamp onto the ribs of the sculpture, rather than holding it in place as he did on our previous visit. This meant that there was less disturbance to the sound, as interference is caused by slight movements of the hand and the resulting changes in pressure of the microphone on the surface.
We tested the microphone on the west side of The Angel, having climbed the mound after leaving the shelter of the trees. The sound through the headphones was the same low pitch as on the previous recordings, but higher and clearer in tone. As gusts of wind buffeted the wings of The Angel, they resonated down into the sculpture and were clearly audible. David also set up a standing microphone to record the atmospheric conditions on site, so that these sounds could be in conversation with the recordings of the Angel’s interior vibrations.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
David wanted to record at the same points on the Angel in different conditions, so we devised a rudimentary map of the sculpture. Walking round The Angel, I counted twenty ribs and we divided these into four groups of five. We mapped these onto the points of the compass, so that we were recording the west, north, east, and south faces of the sculpture.
Counting five ribs round, David clamped the microphone to the back of The Angel, as high as he could reach. The recording here was different in tone, having an eerie quality like the soundtrack of a horror film. The wind’s gusts were still audible, but less dominant than on The Angel’s western side.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Five more ribs counted, and we listened to the sound on The Angel’s east face, again placing the microphone as high on the sculpture as we could reach. As on the western side, the wind once more became the prominent feature. David recorded for five minutes in each location, and he explained that, once these files were placed in sequence, the distinctions between them would become more evident.
The final five ribs took us round to the south of the Angel and David fixed the microphone to the front of its feet. Here, the sound was softer and quieter, and the wind was muted. It felt as though The Angel was sheltering the sound, and us, from the force of the wind.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
David had recorded at the site once more between our first and second visits, rising on a misty dawn to capture the site without the constant rumble of traffic. Even at this time on a Sunday morning, the flow of cars had been unceasing, however, and David had noted that his recordings of the Angel picked up the vibrations of passing vehicles. On this visit, we were unable to hear the resonances of the traffic, and it seemed that the vibrations to the structure caused by the buffeting of the wind were more audible, with the traffic noise receding to a supporting note.
As on our last visit to The Angel, there were several visitors to the site when we were recording. It was notable that this time they did not approach us to ask what we were doing. I wondered whether this was because of the shift in the recording equipment that we were using. On our first visit, David had held the microphone to the body of the Angel and looked like a doctor with a stethoscope. The new method of clamping the microphone to the sculpture involved less direct contact with The Angel, and David looked more like a structural engineer visiting the site to make tests. Even though we were involved in the same activity, it seemed that a minor change in the recording technique – namely, how David attached the contact microphone to The Angel – had changed the appearance of what we were doing, to make it look more technical and more scientific.
