Cerith Wyn Evans

A Critical Analysis of the Installation Untitled (Flute Piece Incarnation White Cube Bermondsey) by Cerith Wyn Evans, 2011

Immediately I can appreciate the exactitude involved in manipulating air within the assembled bowels of a sound sculpture. The precision required to produce a desirable tone from the seven clear crystal flutes is commendable.

Image from - http://www.re-title.com/exhibitions/archive_GaleriaFortesVilaca12574.asp

I admire with intrigue its transparency, a recurring motif in Wyn Evans' work, which flaunts rather honestly its subdued and understated inner workings. Its visual presence is a mere whisper and although large in size, it cowers.

However, in showing the tubes and transparent component housings, what might instead be considered is the material of sound as it engulfs and shrouds the sculpture. Perhaps the sculpture's rigid body is disguised in an inadequate camouflage and thus showing a desire to take a back seat in the interwoven symbiosis with sound.

It would appear then, that this hanging structure would assume a skeletal role forming something of an internal structure in a body of formless sound, the necessary groundwork or footings for a much more ambitious and dynamic form. This is one that aims to infiltrate the listener directly and reciprocally share in the duration of staggered soundings.

In the conversational exchange, from within an aesthetic participatory position, I encounter only a breathing body, a further addition to the gathering viewers and listeners. Naturally, it invites a duet with my own. I question my relevance, I only contribute to found sounds in the soundscape and they curdle with the constructed, however this is an outsider's perspective. I realise from my own, the sculpture and I are both producers, my footsteps and breathing converse with its flutes.