Shirley Renwick

I like discovering

I like uncovering

I like hope

I like listening

I like when my mind changes

I like expansive spaces

I like air

I like nothing

I like seeking truth, I search for it continuously

I like uncertainty

I like to see, I really like to see, I like to really see

I like connections, but also disconnections

I like projections through light, space and air

I like speculating on nonhuman reality

I like feedback loops

I like gaps

I like to imagine what is happening in the invisible

I like reflections

I like traces

I like time especially when it has folded and kneaded itself up and around

I like Heidegger’s wonder of the world worlding around us.

I like action, seen in the paradox of stillness

I like gentle, soft and quiet

I like noise and dischordant becomingness

I like that I contradict myself

I like that all of this will change.

I have been working with 3 core ingredients in 2022: air, sound and technology. 

This work researched the expanded experience in a sub human, nonhuman, posthuman, inhumane and human air space.

My research has been investigating air, its material an immaterial qualities, how it reacts and moves.

This year I have been specifically exploring sound in air: (in a covid-zoom-world – digitally removed from real action - there is still real movement of air molecules between the digital speaker and the human ears).

This research involved workshops and seminars across RCA, and also required investigations into physics of sound waves, human ear biology, sub atomic and atomic vibrations, including feedback, distortion, loops, As well as  sound and air as ecological systems, digital vs acoustic materiality of air, immateriality, new materialism, phenomenology.

In history – humans have been wondering about air since Parmenides, Democrites and Aristotle – "ether" – before that even as Gods and legends and myths. We have given up understanding it frequently saying it cannot be put into language. "Sunyata". I enjoy the ability to embrace the uncertainty, embrace the contradictions, embrace the unknown through art and air.

In art history too – I can trace direct interest in the withdrawn in air to Turner, Constable and the Impressionists, also Marcel Duchamp, Futurists, Art of Noise, and later to Smithson, Irwin, Judy Chicago and the California Light and Space Movement and Takis. Including today Turrell, Eliasson, Saraceno and even more so from the new materialism and ecofeminism front - Yoko Mohri, Marina Rosenfeld who also explore sound in space.

My research collaborating with air, sound and technology, impacted with art history, theory and quantum science has resulted in the reflection: There is no silence. It is a paradox. There is no stillness. Our human senses translate vibrations to understand our environment around us. This piano wire instrument expands our vibrational senses.