Portfolio

This website page provides a summary of key works undertaken since 2017 with an accompanying audio file containing a short extract from each work. Please play the audio file below while browsing this page.

For more information about specific artworks and a full list of my past and current projects, please visit home.

Smack Boys (Ramsgate Festival of Sound 2019) pays homage to the Ramsgate smack boys; child apprentices on Ramsgate’s fishing smacks. They were often recruited from the workhouse and started as young as ten years old. When ashore they lived and rested above the Sailor’s Church in Ramsgate, and later in the Home for Smack Boys next door. Smack Boys explores their existence through sound, voices, games and song, in a choral work and soundscape playing through 11 speakers in the Sailor’s Church. It aims to creates the sense of a time we know little about in living memory, in the form of a lullaby dedicated to the Smack Boys of Ramsgate. Sound effects and voices that feature in the work were created with local children, Ramsgate Sea Scouts, Ramsgate Sea Cadets and schoolchildren from Royal Harbour Academy. For more information, visit Smack Boys.

Materials: One-woman chamber choir (SSA), voice actors and sound effects. 4 looped audio channels of differing length, played through 11 speakers and 3 mp3 players (mono x 1, stereo x 2 and 5.1 surround). Recorded with Zoom H6. Edited with Logic Pro and Izotope RX 5 Audio Editor.

Never Again (Ideas Test, Medway Kent, 2018) is a 9-part song cycle for community choir, featuring spoken voices and archival sound recordings. It was created to commemorate the WW1 centenary of Armistice Day on 11 November 2018. Never Again was inspired by the testimonies of local people living in Rochester, Gravesend, Sheerness and Sittingbourne, who shared ideas, stories and recollections in workshops during the summer of 2018. A project community choir of 35 singers premiered the work on moving trains and at train stations on the Southeastern train network, with musical and sound content geographically mapped to the route. I created a period-style postcard set featuring song lyrics and WW1 propaganda images for audience members to keep as a memento. In 2019, Never Again was nominated for an Ivor Novello Composers Award for Community Music. For more information, visit Never Again.

Materials: 9-part song cycle for community choir with learning resource pack comprising video and audio demonstrations of each part, lyrics, sheet music and cue-sheets. Archival sound recordings sourced from open access historical sound archives, and custom-made postcard sets featuring WW1 propaganda images and song lyrics.

The Illusion Of Conscious Thought (Coastal Currents Festival, Hastings, September 2018) is a two-part sound installation commissioned for the East and West Hill funicular lifts in Hastings. The work comments on regeneration and social mobility in two contrasting parts of Hastings. For more information, visit The Illusion of Conscious Thought.

Materials: 2-part sound installation for East Hill lift (Rock-A-Nore) and West Hill (George Street) in Hastings, with singers, voice actors and sound effects. Created with Zoom F5, Logic Pro and RX 5 Audio Editor. Bespoke ‘up’ and ‘down’ doorbell trigger, ceiling-mounted tannoy box and lift signs. Equipment: UE Boom speaker, Adafruit Audio FX sound board and RavPower bank.

Requiem for Cross Bones (Illuminate Productions, Southwark, London, 2018) is an interactive site-specific 5.1 surround sound installation and series of wooden sculptures for Cross Bones graveyard in Southwark. It features a choral work, recreated historical sound effects and archival sound recordings, mapped to old street maps to reflect the graveyard’s soundscape in the mid 1800s. Visitors trigger playback of music through motion sensors hidden in the wooden crosses. It explores remembrance, where the act of standing still and listening pays respect to the people buried at Cross Bones. It has since exhibited at Ramsgate Festival of Sound (July 2018) and The Sidney Cooper Gallery as part of Emily Peasgood: Living Sound (January – February 2019). For more information, visit Requiem for Crossbones.

Materials: SSATB voice choral work featuring recreated historical sound effects and archival sound recordings. Multichannel, synchronised, interactive 5.1 surround sound installation. Coded with Max MSP and powered by Mac Mini, ultrasonic sensors, Arduino, and speakers encased in wooden memorial crosses. Bespoke wooden crosses (9), hand drawn graves, and memorial wall inviting visitors to leave messages for loved ones.

VOICE100 (POW! Thanet, 2018) is a beat poem featuring the recorded voices of 100 women, men and children aged 5-98 in Thanet, Kent. Each participant took part in a recorded interview exploring experiences and perceptions of women across generations. It was transcribed, edited and augmented into a contemporary beat poem to be experienced in 5.1 surround sound. It premiered at Turner Contemporary on the eve International Women’s Day 2018, 100 years since some women were granted the right to vote. For more information, visit VOICE100.

Materials: Created with ZoomF5, Logic Pro, RX 5 Audio Editor for 5.1 surround. Featuring In The Land Where The Women Wear The Trousers (Fred Godrey, 1910) with permission from Kewchoice Limited.

Halfway to Heaven (Folkestone Triennial, 2017) is an interactive sound installation in The Baptist burial ground on Bradstone Road, Folkestone. Each audio channel is linked to a specific gravestone and contains musical narratives and references to the history of the burial ground and the people buried there, as an act of remembrance. Halfway to Heaven is ‘created’ by visitors working together to activate it, bringing the burial ground into existence once again. In 2018, Halfway to Heaven won an Ivor Novello Composer’s Award for Sonic Art (formerly British Composer’s Award). For more information, visit Halfway to Heaven.

Materials: SSATB voices, multichannel, synchronised and interactive sound installation, coded with C and created with: custom-built computer, ultrasonic sensors, and marine speakers in custom-made memorial urn housing.