Black Ear
5.1 channel sound installation for large space, 7 minutes, 2012.
A small child’s whispering voice is heard in the gallery space, along with dissonant noises and piano sounds. The child, as well as attempting to speak to ‘you’, the gallery visitor, is also, it seems, voicing over a film that we cannot see. The child haltingly reveals that the film may have been shown in the gallery sometime in the past. It contains a disturbing scene involving the death of the child’s pet stoat, seemingly staged by his father, the filmmaker. It seems that the child’s voice-over has departed the body of the film to haunt the gallery: seeking someone, maybe ‘you’, to lay it to rest. The work was first installed with an unsettling gallery installation by Leo Fitzmaurice which created a disturbed space, where the walls of the rooms seemed to be slipping down onto the floors, and vice versa. Thanks to Sean Rooney. Commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery.
A stereo version of the work appears on the Paul Rooney album Futile Exorcise on Owd Scrat Records.
Robert Clark (The Guardian). 31/3/2012 preview of the work.