Below are three examples of site-based works made with one other collaborator.
Under Cover
Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner
A sound installation in Bristol's Arnolfini bookshop made for Live Art Forum South West's platform event in April 2002.
You’re just browsing. The books wait on the shelves. A room full of voices, all wanting to be heard. How do you choose which book to take down?
The work was a three-dimensional sonic collage of whispered texts, seemingly spoken by the books themselves, achieved through the placement of a series of small speakers at the back of the shop's bookshelves. It explored the layering of conflicting, complementary, reassuring and dissident voices and the idea of these texts as performers in an enclosed space. It comprised the whispered opening lines from over 100 books drawn from the fiction, performing arts, art, film, design and theory sections of the bookshop.
Out of the way: 3 square walks
Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner
Commissioned for the Method Lab strand of In Between Time's second Bristol-based festival of live art and intrigue in February 2003.
I was thinking of someone, I forget who, who said that maps were disrupted by stories. Walk the byways of Bristol in your own time with a couple of absent mis-guides. Drift across the map and let yourself be distracted by the stories of this city. Step on the cracks between the paving stones and be caught by the half-truths and myths that lurk beneath.
The work comprised three double-sided, weather-proof postcards, each containing provocations for a walk relating to the specific environs of one of the festival venues.
Images: Stephen Hodge.
Postcard/walk #1
Postcard/walk #2
Postcard/walk #3
Longshore Drift
Stephen Hodge and Simon Persighetti
A coastal drift from Ynyslas to Aberystwyth commissioned to launch the AHRC-funded Living Landscapes conference in June 2009.
Longshore Drift was a practiced manifesto for drifting on the edge. Starting on Ynyslas spit at the mouth of the Afon Dyfi, and moving southwards against the prevailing current of Cardigan Bay, we led a six-hour walk for twenty participants. Participant-walkers were constrained by a rule that meant they must remain in visual contact of the shifting shoreline. From B(orth) to A(berystwyth). Across dunes, past pill boxes, over groynes and petrified trees, participants created an unnatural backwash: collecting, carrying, temporarily reversing the flow of edgeland material, before reconfiguring it below the promenade at Aberystwyth. Arriving in the town just before the Living Landscapes main launch event, Simon and I reflected on our journey in one of the first papers of the conference.
Images: Stephen Hodge, Cara Brostrom, Simon Persighetti, Clare Qualmann.
Setting off over Ynyslas sand dunes
Looking south from a former pillbox
Evidence of longshore drift
The top of an end of groyne marker post
Pushing on towards Borth
Borth's provisional back garden architectures
Pausing at the memorial on Borth cliffs
The long, undulating cliff path
At the threshold of the Sarn Gynfelyn shingle spit
Building a fragile castle from flotsam and jetsam
The final stretch of cliff path
The panoptic view from Constitution Hill
Crossing the beach at Aberystwyth
Closing words on the beach below Aberystwyth Castle
