Ode to the OO

BACKGROUND The interdisciplinary Bauhaus and its continuing legacy in abstraction in visual art and design was an influence on the creative mode of Ode to the OO, a site-specific installation comprising sound, painting and sculpture. Laura Provost, Susan Phillipz, Samson Young and Carsten Nicolai, whose installations and sculptures are activated by sound, provided a context for my explorations of the permeability of mediums. As my research evolved, my focus became the relationship between abstraction and symbolism, between hard-edge and expressionist painting, in ways that connected with the site itself, and modernist artists such as Felix De Boeck, G.R. Santosh. CONTRIBUTION Made in collaboration with composer James Hayes, the project centres a soundscape honouring the ʻōʻō bird, once native to the islands of Hawai'i. Extinct in the 1980s, its song with no reply conjures many ghosts at a time of mass losses. I used electricity, colour, light, sound and magnetic fields as imprints on the ether as we all dissolve into particles of memory or data. Trapped in our grid of reason, represented by the architecture of the site, I imagined escape routes (or ‘bird’ paths) that bend and dissolve bars, lines and geometries – a series of traces or afterimages of bird or bird-ness. I used the grid of the architecture as an organising principle, escaping its rigidity and the ‘stuckness’ of lockdown by taking cues from expressive graffiti over our signage. Working quickly in response to a site when limited by lockdown was extremely productive. SIGNIFICANCE Ode to the OO was supported & funded by Gertrude Contemporary. It was a pivotal work in my career registering a shift back to my core interests in the tropes of modernism.