FPG Sounds: Nastassja Simensky and Rebecca Lee, ’Sunken Barges’

Focal Point Gallery is pleased to announce the tenth commission as part of ‘FPG Sounds’, an online project to support the development of new sound works by artists from or based in Southend-on-Sea.

For their contribution to Focal Point Gallery’s experimental sound programme artist’s Nastassja Simensky and Rebecca Lee present Rings on Water. The commission for Focal Point Gallery continues Nastassja and Rebecca’s previous collaborations and draws on their shared interest in time, listening, material culture and land-use. The new audio work takes the form of a collection of sonic fieldnotes and includes field recordings, amateur radio and writing from Leaky Transmissions, Nastassja’s ongoing research and work in Bradwell and the Blackwater Estuary.

Many types of human transmission comingle and leave their mark on the Estuary, which is itself an increasingly regulated and privatised space. Cellular networks coalesce with wireless connections, electrical substations with Bluetooth signal, slow-scan television with ham radio transmissions. High-frequency short wavelengths of irradiated graphite within Bradwell A Power Station occupy the opposite end of radio spectrum to the long wavelengths of amateur radio and VLF signals generated by thunderstorms and solar weather. Non-human forces persist, from the Estuary's conductive geology, to sputtering background radiation, to the Earth's vast and sweeping electromagnetic fields.

Rings on Water uses a variety of recording and transmission technologies, from FM radio, magnetic tape, coil receivers, hydrophones and contact mics to traverse the protected saltmarshes and shale banks of the Dengie Peninsular and industrial arable land. Slow Scan Television (SSTV) and the politics of ‘radio’ as a means of transmission, collision, translation and interference are used to consider the material legacies of changing land-use and energy production in the Blackwater Estuary. SSTV is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures over the radio spectrum.

About the artists: 

Nastassja Simensky often works collaboratively to make writing, place-specific performances, events, sound work and films as a form of ongoing fieldwork. Leaky Transmissions is a body of artwork and research Nastassja is developing through a PhD at the Slade exploring changing land-use and the potential of collaborative fieldwork involving artists and archaeologists. Works from this commission will inform Simensky's inclusion in the group exhibition 'Receiver' at Focal Point Gallery from 2nd October to 23rd December 2022.

Rebecca Lee is a musician, composer, and sound practitioner producing performance, sound works, projects, and publications, with a particular focus on narrative, time and collaborative methods. She often works long term with place, draws on written forms, and uses improvisation, scores, and DIY approaches to combine musical materials, forms, or skills.

https://www.fpg.org.uk/exhibition/rings-on-water/