'Kindertotenlieder'

Opening Date: 2005-Sep-01
Closing Date: 2006-Sep-01
In 2004 Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) was jointly commissioned and managed by Opera North Projects, Leeds and Picture This, Bristol in collaboration with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham and Impressions Gallery, York. I was asked to respond to Mahler's song cycle, itself was based on Rückert's Romantic verse. Between 1902 and 1904 Gustav Mahler set to music a personal selection of five poems by the German writer Friedrich Rückert, who had written more than 400 poems after the loss of two of his children.

Kindertotenlieder fuses contemporary visual arts with classical music and literature, offering an insight of nineteenth century cross-art form collaboration between a musician, a poet and now: a vocalist and a contemporary artist - all drawing on universal human themes. The recording of Kindertotenlieder used in the exhibition is a 1945 archive recording of a performance by Kathleen Ferrier.

A five-part moving image installation was created. This consists of five rooms, one dedicated to each song, that are all open on one side allowing access and leakage of the sound, and contain a moving image element back projected into a window, a doorknob, a mirror etc. There is both the cacophony of all five songs playing simultaneously in the exhibition space and the singled out song in the individual room. It creates a breadth of perception ranging from a rather stressful howling lament to the very intimate and beautiful 'momentary emotion' of each poem.

The landscape imagery used has all been filmed on 16mm film in the Swiss Alps. These very slowly shifting films are installed in a way that the viewer supposedly experiences both: feeling fully immersed and being totally removed from them.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3P0RbMH...