Sound Matters, a Crafts Council exhibition, considers the connections between craft and sound art through seven contemporary works from a range of creative disciplines.

Each work demonstrates a different approach; looking to traditional craft heritage and processes such as weaving and wood-turning to create new sound forms, playing with shared technologies and language and revealing the sounds of materials. Works featured are:

  • Max Eastley’s sound sculpture ‘Landscape’ uses an embedded motor and magnets to move metal fragments across a canvas surface to create a subtle sound landscape.
  • Keith Harrison’s film ‘Lucie Rie vs Grindcore’ shows two potter’s wheels adapted to become turntables. One playing grindcore metal and the other scratching, via the arm needle, through clay slip to create a clay record referencing Rie’s sgraffito decorative technique
  • Cathy Lane’s ‘Tweed’ features voices and sounds from two weaver’s studios in the Outer Hebrides to create an evocative recording of industry, craft, heritage and personal knowledge and experience.
  • Owl Project’s ‘9 Volt Speaker’ is an acoustically designed 11-sided wooden speaker and ‘Sound Lathe’ is a pole lathe which converts movement into electronic music.
  • Scanner and Ismini Samanidou’s collaboration resulted in two ‘Weave Waves’ textile pieces; representing a visual recording of the artists’ breathing and a soundscape of Manchester and London, both demonstrating the common binary language used for digital sound recordings and textile production.
  • Studio Weave’s ‘Polyphony’ is a spun aluminium ‘ear’ which separates, abstracts and re-organises external sounds via a sphere of funnels in which the visitor stands.
  • Dominic Wilcox and Yuri Suzuki’s ‘Sounds of Making in East London’ documents the sounds of 21 skilled makers at work.

With its equal emphasis on sound and form, Sound Matters offers a multi-sensory engagement with craft, with each work demanding to be heard as well as as seen.

Sound Matters is produced by the Crafts Council with David Toop, Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at University of the Arts London, as curatorial advisor, and with exhibition design by Faudet-Harrison and graphic design by A Practice for Everyday Life.