Sounding Out Interpretation

Inside the Circle of Fire is a new exhibition at Sheffield's Millennium Galleries by Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Chris Watson. Chris spent 18 months recording the sounds of Sheffield to create this immersive sound map of the city's heart beat, from bird song in Ecclesall Woods or on the city's Peak District fringe to Forgemaster's blast furnaces, football crowds and Fargate on a Friday night. He deliberately calls the exhibition a site-specific sound map which recreates the sounds of 21st Century Sheffield. He hopes audiences have a creative relationship with the exhibition, there imaginations stimulated by recognisable and personal sounds.

Sound from Inside the Circle of Fire.

I visited the exhibition today and was struck by the emotional and powerful potential of using artistically-conceived sound as interpretation in a gallery environment.

Reclining on a cushion, I was transported directly and vividly to places I associated with the sounds. Strong, personal connections though none of the sounds were otherwise signposted or captioned. You, as listener had to actively work to make those connections, to interpret the places in Sheffield evoked in the songs of birds and chants of football crowds, in the roar of furnaces and churn of rivers. Each new sound brought a place, sometimes more than one, to mind and raised a range of emotions, all of which originated from my own experiences of those 'imagined' places. I assume that sometimes the places I associated with the sounds are the same locations Chris recorded and sometimes they are different. I will have no way of knowing beyond the small number of places mentioned in the exhibition's publicity. Perhaps I transmuted the sound of the crowd at Bramall Lane into my real-life experience of matches at Hillsborough - or vice versa. It really doesn't matter, what is important is that I re-envisaged a moment in my life in Sheffield through the power of sound. Projected photographs do aid place recognition, but are never displayed to match the sounds. The exhibition probably does require you to have life experiences of Sheffield to create strong, emotional remembrances and mental geo-transportations.

Sound from Inside the Circle of Fire. With added surreal dimension from a four-year old's voiceover on behalf of a soap.

This is aural art as part-celebration, part-interpretation of a contemporary landscape and biographically timelined relationships with it. Sound enables emotional triggers which (re)create moments in time and space so that exhibition audiences dynamically reveal and tell their own stories of places in reaction to those sounds. Multiple personal conversations are provoked between spatial structure and the individual in a way that didactic interpretation can not manage. Inside the Circle of Fire is a good example of how successfully and powerfully we can interpret places by providing space for the audiences to do some of the work themselves.

Chris Watson talks about Inside the Ring of Fire

http://youtu.be/h1x_wvFmqi8

Calver Weir Finale

Calver Weir Exhibition

The Calver Weir oral history project came to a glorious end this weekend with an exhibition in Calver Village Hall.

Over 200 people visited the exhibition over the weekend. The launch was attended by 10 interviewees, 2 Heritage Lottery Fund officers, all of the oral history team and about another 15 residents and visitors.

Interviewees watch the movie

The event was the culmination to 18 months hard work by the team, who had recorded 22 interviews and searched Derbyshire Record Office's collection of Calver Mill documents. Highlights include finding the sources of the 19th century mill's cotton and the range of tools required each year to keep it operating, childhood memories of playing on the weir and river, working life at Sissons stainless steel factory and the filming of Colditz by the BBC. The main success was seeing a group of people come together, learn historical skills and work as a team.

The oral history team

inHeritage has been involved with the project throughout, mentoring and guiding the volunteers and producing a travelling exhibition, booklet, movie, comic and podcasts. We have also created an archive which is deposited in Calver, Derbyshire Record Office, the Peak District National Park Authority and the East Midlands Oral History Archive.

Booklet, comic and celebratory ale 

The Movie

The exhibition

The comic

The food

Castleton - Hope Exhibition Launches

Project steering group - Alan, Angela, Di, Bill, Kay and Ann
after installing the exhibition

Yesterday Hope and Castleton Historical Societies launched the Lives of the Common People exhibition at Castleton Visitor Centre.

inHeritage has worked with the societies to produce the exhibition as part of our involvement throughout the project. The exhibition is one result from over a year of work by 65 volunteers who have researched hundreds of documents, excavated 55 test pits and surveyed three old routeways as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund supported Lives of the Medieval Common People.

Visitors browse exhibition panels and pottery display

The societies developed the themes, in a session with the project steering group led by Bill at Castleton Visitor Centre in March. These are the search for the common people, farmers, lead miners, routes, churches, houses and everyday objects. Bill drafted nine panels of text based on this session, selected photographs taken by participants and directed society members to take photographs specially for the exhibition. Once the steering group were happy with the text and images, inHeritage offered 8 different design styles with varying types of layout and fonts to the group to choose. The final style was a combination of two of these sample layouts. We then managed production, choosing a drop-down banner style as the best solution to hang in the visitor centre and for later use by the societies.

Project participants Jill, Dave and Leah at the launch

The steering group also chose finds from the test pits to display in two exhibition cabinets. These include parts of a human skeleton, a cat skeleton, clay tobacco pipes, pottery and medieval window glass.

Ken Smith opens the exhibition

Forty people attended the launch of the exhibition yesterday, all of them either participating in project research or providing their gardens for test pits.  The exhibition was opened by Ken Smith, Cultural Heritage Team Manager for the Peak District National Park Authority, with Chris Pennell and Geoff Nickolds from the HLF's East Midlands committee also present.

HLF East Midlands Committee Chair Chris Pennell says a
few words

Di Curtis, project steering group member, thanks everyone
involved

The exhibition is open until Thursday 30th May. Entry is free during the visitor centre's opening times. You can find times and other centre details on the Authority's website.

The exhibition will then be displayed by Hope Historical Society at Hope Wakes Week between Saturday 22nd and Sunday 30th June.

The Societies are grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Peak District National Park Authority and the University of Sheffield for their support.

Worcester Panels

The 9 pull-up panels for The Butts exhibition, to open in The Hive, Worcester in July arrived today. The panels look great and the bamboo casing and poles for the pull-ups give them a much better look than the standard brushed aluminium.

All of the last elements of the exhibition are arriving this week including the baskets, rugs and washing line for the under 7s Rogue's Gallery. The costumes are already here featuring a Roman female, Tudor archer and Victorian cattle worker.

The motion activated Message in a Speaker is also here and about to be programmed.

Worcester Archives Source Project

We are delighted to be working with Worcester Record Office on a major project to create an exhibition for the opening of The Hive, a new landmark multi-use building in the centre of the city. 

We have been contracted to produce the exhibition including display panels, audio-visual presentations, a children's time detective's trail and a rogue's gallery. Material for primary school children is central to the exhibition so we will be working once again with Marvin Harding, artist for the inHeritage comics. The exhibiton will tell the story of The Butts, as known through documents and archaeological excavations in advance of building The Hive. It is both a celebration of the work of WASP and the opening of the building which brings together record office, archaeology services, public library and university library in one distinctive building.

Details of WASP can be found on the project website -http://www.worcestershire.gov.uk/cms/records/projects/wasp.aspx. The exhibition is scheduled to open with the building in summer 2012.