Sophie Clements
Evensong
About the artist
Sophie Clements is a visual artist working specifically in relation to sound and music. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2005, her work takes the form of audio-visual installation, music video, live performance and collaborative work with musicians, all unified by her approach to the 'visualisation' of sound (or vice versa), and the expression of the two languages of sound and visual as a singular voice.
About the work
Evensong is a piece of visual music; it is a song, sung by layers of landscape and the geometric light forms that emerge from them. Using a process of 'painting' in real space with light, Evensong explores the notion of physical reality in relation to time and memory. The light objects are not fake, but they are still unreal - an altered memory of an event that happened - a movement in time seen in its entirety, like the beauty of hindsight. The lights are filmed in the exact space that you see them, involving a long process of filming an LED light moving in precise geometric shapes, (all moved individually by hand in situ using hand-built rigs such as wooden frames and bicycle wheels), and layering up consecutive frames to make the whole movement of the light visible as a single object. The light forms are notes of a score whose pages are the six different landscapes. In a sense, the process of creating an edit was more like writing a score - a moving graphical score that would be brought to life by finding the sounds that embody the essence of the image, with many of the decisions of placement, timing and dynamics made with the musical structure foremost in mind. Titled 'Evensong' not as a direct reference to its religious connotations, but rather a reflection of mood that the lights and landscape themselves suggest - the piece is somehow a melancholy celebration of dusk and stillness - an essence of something else - the 'planned' unforeseen, seeping out of the systematic process of filming. These objects are at once sound and light, real and unreal, kinetic and frozen, and the beauty that comes with them lies on the edge between these opposites.
