DALE BERNING SAWA
Journalist. Writer. Artist.
Untitled, 1974
My godson and his brothers ring bells in their village church. It's 700 years old, and the bells have beautiful twisted coloured ropes. They ring with their father, as they did with their grandmother before she passed. And if they're wearing suits, they take their jackets off, and tuck their ties in between the buttons of their shirts, so they don't catch on the ropes.
I recently met a fox, while playing piano, alone, in St Barnabas Dalston, Hackney’s early Modernist concrete secret.
It all felt like prayer.
An archive of melodies and noticings recorded while walking around the city. A response to Oppenheim's still installation of her singing about an established absence. These recordings are like aural cairns, marking journeys and time spent, usually on the way to fetch my child, with the music in my head.
Stereo sound installation presented with a book of drawings, Take Ninagawa Gallery, Tokyo, November 24 2006 – January 27 2007
A reflection on pattern, movement, mapping and the sounds of these things. Four people dance barefoot on a linoleum floor in a dance studio. One person rides a bike over the loose cement slabs that make up the tow path of Regent's Canal. Two clocks fall in and out of synch in an otherwise silent room at midnight. A glitch in an audio rendering makes a track sound fluttering, broken, husky, crepuscular, somehow faraway and yet as close and inescapable as the feeling of your pulse when you block your ears. Like the thick velvet rapid-eye movement of a moth flying into a lightbulb, moths swarming, black and frantic against the light, the blindingn light of a lit bulb in a room that wants to be dark, soft and anxious.
We sat on wooden steps leading up to wooden rooms, walked slowly through the ancient guarded gates and along the covered wood walkways. We crossed a river on giant stepping stones, cast cement and stone, docile turtles unperturbed, water birds gathering, the ground rose to my right, I listened. Passed the canal, the sound of water running up to and against and along the concrete walls of the bridge, the steady clicking of bicylces to my right and then my left, my left, again, crocheted rhythms disappearing.
