"Panelák. Fenced square garden at the entrance. Tree limbs, dried skin of snake, snails with cracked shells. Once upon a time there were plants. Soaked orange peel in front of the door. Buzzing of door bells. Elevator drone. You count the floors while you follow the picture instructions. Capacity and weight of three-dimensional space. You are entering the apartment. Horseshoe above the door. A wooden mask next to a whistling kettle. Seashells in plastic box. Phantom signal. Sheep fur on the couch. You straighten out all the folds. Mute TV. Documentary program- wolves, octopus, worms and a shark. Clock metronome. One minute, two minutes, twenty-seven minutes. 60% polyester pyjamas. Brain-shaped smog behind the window. Smoke, dust or just fog. You put wax in one ear, cotton in the other. I love this city and its outlying lands. My romantic landscape.
Sarah Hughes’ multidisciplinary arts practice, comprising composition, performance, curating and installation, revolves around the relationship between social and environmental systems of cooperation. The work draws from various contexts including ecology, feminist politics, alternative economies, land use, and protest in order to explore speculative systems of organisation and collaboration as the ground for social change.
Hughes’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally, including at South London Gallery, Punt WG Amsterdam, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Supplement, and Modern Art Oxford. Her compositions have been performed by various ensembles and at various festivals including London Contemporary Music Festival, Music We'd Like To Hear, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Realisations of her compositions have been published by Another Timbre, Suppedaneum, Melange Editions, and Consumer Waste, and broadcast on the BBC."
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Composed and performed by Sarah Hughes
For zither, piano, Hammond organ, sine tones, white noise, electric harpsichord and objects.
Written in response to the work of Fernand Léger First performed at an exhibition of his work at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes
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Recorded by Patrick Farmer at SARU studios, 2017, Oxford
The recording was supported Sound and Music and Oxford Brookes University
Artwork by Andrea Šafaříková (andreasafarikova.com)
Risograph print by HIBERNANT.NET
Available as a 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC download
"Sarah Hughes’ poetics are fully part of the “magnetic song” of sound art properly so called: it may appear to be the simplest music in the world, but maintaining such control over the various acoustic sources, adding only and exclusively the essentials, is a proof of artistic maturity and humility that only a truly sensitive listener can recognize and appreciate." - Esoteros.net
