SURROUNDED IN TEARS Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, UK
Surrounded in Tears
2004
Sound sculpture
We have developed an extensive vocabulary to classify and understand the act of crying: weeping (associated with deep emotion)
is different to blubbering (colloquial, derogatory) or bawling (associated with children).
Marking moments of extreme emotional and physical pain, as well as intense pleasure, crying is a universal pre-linguistic human expression.
'Surrounded in Tears’ brings together 100 individual cries into a composition playing through twenty-two megaphones
on a sixteen-minute loop.
The sources are from ethnographic and anthropological archives, as well as sounds captured from everyday life. They range from recordings made by midwives of newly born babies to the oldest known wax cylinder recordings - the sounds of Australian Aborigine death wails from the Torres Strait collected in 1898 and held in the British Library.
Presented at:
XI Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2011, awarded Primer premio de XI Bienal de Cuenca)
Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada (2009)
Musee D’Art De Joliette Quebec, Canada (2008)
Fundacion Telefonica, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2007)
Kunstverein Freiburg, Switzerland (2006
)
Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, UK (2004)
Collaborators:
Jasper Morrison (designer)
Michael Nyman (composer)
