Hannah Rickards, 'Birdsong', 2003, installation at the South London Gallery.
I've never been told that I sing like a bird (in fact no bird could possibly sing as out of tune, I've heard), but I bet Hannah Rickards, like Edith Piaf and Dolly Parton, has. Maybe even by experts in the field, and it would not be empty rhetorical flattery; 'Birdsong', her 2003 project for 'Beating about the bush in the "secret garden"' at the South London Gallery, was a recording of her own voice shifted back to its 'natural' pitch (ie, adjusting it to a bird's vocal range) so that it not only sounds like a mimicking of birds in melody and punctuation, but almost in every other way also rather like the real thing itself, as real as a human bird could sound.
In an entrancing, unsettling manner the artist explored links between nature and culture entering and reconstructing the connection herself, as a comment on humanity's power to interfere with what is already there. Rickards' (b. 1979, London) work was one of the highlights of subtlety in that year's Bloomberg's new contemporaries. Its selectors (JJ Charlesworth, Cerith Wyn Evans, Hayley Newman and Rebecca Warren) commented on the eeriness and profound sense of human presence in its camouflaged, parroty intonation.
Rickards continues to explore the malleable, wobbly truth and blindly trusted elements of sound-phenomena in her first solo show in London, opening this week at The Showroom. Here's a clue about the project - read it out loud and see whether it works: 'The sound I think it makes is, is that whispering sound, to me it sounds, it almost sounds, um, uh, what's the word I'm thinking? Like a legend, you know, when you think of a legend or something way back int eh past you get that, that, it sounds like that to me, like this legend or somebody's, this whispering sound: it's a legend.'
The description, and others in the show, reconstructs a sound that only a small number of people have perceived - an accompaniment to the visual phenomenon of the Northern Lights - and which Rickards presents effectively without ever reproducing it, just by mirroring it, like synaesthetic evidence calling on our sense of belief as much as on our senses.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
HANNAH RICKARDS
To 17 June 2007
The Showroom
44 Bonner Road
London, E2 9JS
T: +44 (0)20 8983 4115
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