Voice, piano, field recordings, voice memos
A live, acoustic reworking of my 2007 album, The Horse Stories — the original is a set of compositions assembled from layered and processed music box samples. For this live set, I attempted to transcribe and notate the melodies for voice and piano.
Coloured pencil and black ink pen on Arches paper (419 x 216mm; triptych: 499 x 690 mm each); a miscellany of found sound objects; drawings activated by two young children
Several drawings and a box of pieces (a length of fake leather, a crochet rose, various wooden blocks, a box of small green pins, a shattered piece of plastic, a coral bead, metal rings, a metal hex wrench, pottery sherds, plastic cutout patchwork templates in various colours, fabric triangles, various marbles, boardgame counters, a necklace of black bauble beads, perspex shards) were posted to the exhibition venue with this set of hand-written instructions, for two young children to play with on top of the drawings and install as they wished.
Installation of sound objects and drawings, activated by the artist
Performed during eponymous exhibition at Take Ninagawa Gallery, Tokyo, January 17 - February 21, 2009
Created and performed at Blurr 7 performance festival, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, November 2009
Using field recordings, sound objects, a custom-made sound-dress, apron and gumboots, I performed a spoken-word piece, The Narrator's Prologue (for Révèrien), written during a residency at the Jerusalem Centre for the Visual Arts, with the help of three young children.
Performed during Sequence and Repetition II, at Jerwood Space, London, June 2007
An entirely acoustic performance combining song with a collection of toys, objects and instruments, things used for their own sounds, strung together in time. An instance of play and curiosity. Something like an audio Etch-A-Sketch drawing.
a glass bottle of water; sparkling water; glasses; some effervescent tablet; marbles; bells; wind chimes; door chimes; glass bracelets; bell bracelets; string; cotton thread; sticky tape; vinyl tape; tools; building materials: nuts, bolts, screws; a glockenspiel; a harmonium; a calimba; a harpcoins; a piggybank; a keyboard; a drum; beads; balls; ball bearings; elastic bands on an egg box
Performed as part of walkwalkwalk: The Musical, convened by guest artist Tai Shani, for Site Projects and Resonance 104.4fm, in the laundrette at the bottom of Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London, September 24, 2006
"It's always a little bit nerve-racking the hour or two before a walk, usually everything is ready and it's just a wait to see how many people will come. This one was the same- but different too because so many other people were involved. I guess you can't ever plan for everything, and it was exciting to not know exactly what to expect. Once you get over the fear that no one will come, and then get over the fear that too many people will come, you can start to walk and it all feels like it will work out o.k. It was a spectacular sight, a stream of people stretching down Cambridge Heath road then being ushered into the launderette. Dale Berning waited, getting the audience to squeeze into a strange raised space looking over the washing and drying machines before she began. Her song was mournful, the words indecipherable, sung so quietly that you almost had to hold your breath to try and hear above the churning of the mach-ines in the background. It was a perfect translation of the way that space feels - strangely familiar, but with a sinister edge, public but private at the same time. It set the tone for the whole walk, a series of extraordinary events that drew ideas from these overlooked and everyday places and communicated them anew."
- Clare Qualmann
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'Even the shadows are agitated, with a random hectic pulsing along the edges." Paul Auster
Rattling and rolling trebles, sharp and bright, close to your ears and inside your head. Vibrations you feel with your whole body. Layers and fragments, arrhythmic percussion, oscillators, mobile phone frequencies, voicemail and birdsong, digital skippings, fastforwarding, reversing, stutter and shuffle, broken phrases.