Untold Stories
Untold Stories was commissioned by East Durham Creates through an open call. The Auxiliary Project Space proposed ‘From the Campfire to the Hearth’ and invited Nell alongside several other artist-facilitators to collaborate.
For Untold Stories: From the Campfire to the Hearth, we ran workshops at two local outdoor places: Easington Barn and Thornley Village Centre.
In the workshops, we talked about our experiences of being outdoors, and about how the sounds of the natural environment can help us to feel more relaxed or peaceful. The resulting Sonic Stories are created from the group’s interactions with the natural environment. All the sounds you hear were made and recorded by the people attending the workshops.
In each workshop, the starting point was to make and record sounds that would be relaxing to listen to. Each workshop took on its own shape according to the location, what interested everyone, and who they had in mind as future listeners to the recordings that they were making.
The sound pieces that you can hear on the headphones are my interpretation of these recordings and the wishes or intentions of the participants. I hope to have done justice to everyone’s commitment and engagement with the process.
When people first put headphones on, they often react with genuine amazement: Listening to the world through a microphone amplifying everyday sounds allows you to experience things in a new way. You pay attention to what is around you differently. In the outdoor environment, you become a lot more aware of your own presence, your movements, the sounds you make and your interaction with the landscape around you. You might first of all spend some time exploring all the sounds you can make - swishing grass, footsteps on leaves, snapping and scraping sticks - but often there is time spent being a lot more still than usual, slowing down to ‘be with’ the environment. You start to feel more connected to the place you are in.
What I hear in these recordings is an amazing sensitivity of touch, the care people have taken, and their attentiveness to the local landscapes that they know. I also hear the excitement of creating: recording your sound-making can be a way to express yourself but also to collaborate with the materials that we are amongst and which we are ultimately part of. The sounds we heard in the landscape also led us along some imaginative paths where the emerging narratives were strange, mysterious, or uncanny.
When the weather was a little unhelpful we took the Sonic Story-making indoors and invented landscapes and spaces, taking inspiration from each participant’s imaginations and their experimental sound-making.
The Campfire workshops were a way of making together: creating methods for sound-making and recording; ideas about how to put sounds together; and imaginative ways of responding to the places we were in. The sound pieces represent these joyful and exciting meetings. Here are sounds of places, voices and living organisms that otherwise would remain unheard; stories of places that would not normally be told.
Project information: Untold stories is a commissioning strand led by East Durham Creates which aims to spotlight and share the stories of those in our communities who feel their voices aren’t heard or represented in work created by the cultural sector or even by East Durham Creates. In early 2022 two open call outs took place led by our Community Panel.
The Auxiliary – Stories from Campfire to Hearth
The Auxiliary are an established gallery and studio space based in Middlesbrough most noted for leading the Middlesbrough Arts Weekender and Sonic Arts Week. Their commission is based on the concept of gathering around a campfire with food to share stories and they will be bringing a range of artforms and artists into the commission. Campfires have been held at the Barn at Easington, Thornley Village Centre and Blackhall Community Centre followed by a number of workshops. www.theauxiliary.co.uk
Photo and Video by Rachel Deakin