What Listening Knows was a 3-channel audio and video installation by Australian artists Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, commissioned for our second Moving Image exhibition at Messums West. The research and filming were undertaken here in Wiltshire in the Summer of 2019, when Sonia and David were Messums’ first artists-in-residence. The resulting video uses unique Wiltshire environments as sites to explore the act of listening.
The project is built up around three individual performers acting as ‘field recordists’ in the landscape, trailing through cornfields, traversing unfathomable henges and earthworks, and scanning anthills and ancient forests. Each performer, armed with microphones and headphones, was prompted to physically interrogate the landscape from non-typical perspectives, activating their listening to find new ways to capture the acoustic forces of the environment.
Following these acoustic cues, Leber & Chesworth developed a camera style detached from its ocular-centric perspective, imbued with an acoustic consciousness, at times tipping and rotating the landscape, levitating rocky masses, and trailing growths in the forest from both macro and micro perspectives.
Sonia and David’s work experiments with how humans reframe and manipulate their experience of the world. They are particularly interested in to how the ‘act of listening’ can inform us in a very different way to visual perception and their work investigates this disconnect.
What Listening Knows was shown alongside Myriad Falls (2017) – a cinematic rumination on chronometric time and natural forces that is focussed on a cluster of outmoded analogue wristwatches installed on a calibrating machine in a horologist’s workshop.
