A Steady Backbeat
Materials; Sand, clay, gouache and two sound compositions played through broken phones and amplified by the clay conches.
Images courtesy of Christo Crocker.
This work was completed during a residency at Banff Centre for Creativity.
This was an installation comprised of various elements and which filled the room with sounds.
The conch has a way to capture the human imagination and for me, having grown up going to museums where I could see Precolumbian Mayan and Pipil recreations of conches as instruments, sculptures and vessels rendered from clay, I wanted to see how I could also contemporise my own version of the conch as a sound and sculptural object which mimicked the internal structure which make the conch so effective in amplifying sounds. Outside of the technical aspects of the work I wanted to experiment with amplifying compositions that speak to how a migrant communicates with one's own origin and experiences in the contemporary context.
Lucreccia Quintanilla
Thank you to NAVA for funding my trip to Banff via the Sainsbury Sculpture Prize and to
Bopha Chhay for sharing this beautiful article by Stefan Helmreich written for Cabinet Journal’s issue 48.