House of Embers was presented at the Gallery of Modern Art in June 2022 through an expanded sculptural voice, lost museum materiality and disembodied sounds. The ‘House’ is speculatively set in the year 2222, where an unknown invigilator called Em now guards and ruminates amongst the almost empty ruins of the Gallery of Modern Art. Their waking hours are making sure no one touches anything, at all, ever. One little graze could mean disaster for those that are not immune. Be it lava, pumice, uranium, ashes, sand, thorium, sonic atomic pigment.
What remains in the city, now adapts to the crumbling heat, absorbing a perpetual molten murmur that rises daily, while shimmering towards a queer dystopia in this new Glasgchu. It is a smoking whisper to those that have been passed by with a trace of dereliction, House of Embers unbuilds and excavates the unspoken detritus of what was once Glasgow Lyfe.
Placed subtly throughout parts of the building for one weekend only, this work played between presence and absence, collection and disposal; a trace to reference the (mis)use of workers, public museums, Samuel Becketts failed radio play, Gordon Matta Clark’s ‘Splitting’ and the opulent residence of ‘The House of the Faun’, a site that was preserved in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Pompeii in 79 A.D.
Formed through means of excavation and sampling, both in material and sound; collecting remnants of the electromagnetic tones hidden in the sandstone and via debris fallen from the facade of Glasgows public museums. It is temporary, hidden and forever a speculative loop of heat.
List of works:
'MURMUR' - balcony
(edited electromagnetic, field & contact mic recordings of GOMA building, with samples of molten lava flow processed through a moog minitaur)
'WONDER WHERE THE DAMAGE GOES' - gallery 2
(speaker case, brass object removed plaque, edited electromagnetic samples of GOMA lifts, door fob, public toilets)
'INVIGILATOR' - gallery 4
(speculative future, security boots, speakers, rubber, oil pastel with custom 'dirt' made of fallen GOMA & Kelvingrove sandstone, palm ashes, lava rock, crushed chrondrite meteor and Kelvingrove marble)
'BAGFORLYFE' - outside building
(custom printed/drawn 'shopper' bag, rubber)
click link for video documentation.
