Listening to Oxford

Hannah Rickards To enable me to fix my attention ... Installation at Modern Art Oxford (2014)

My recent visit to Oxford coincided with some brilliant exhibitions. At Modern Art Oxford I enjoyed Roelef Louw's Pyramid (Soul City), a carefully constructed pyramid of 6,000 oranges which gradually disappears as visitors help themselves to fruit (15 February - 6 April). It's rare for an art gallery to smell so good.

However, I was really there to see Hannah Rickards' To enable me to fix my attention on any one of these symbols I was to imagine that I was looking at the colours as I might see them on a moving picture screen (15  February - 21 April). Exploring extraordinary natural phenomena (thunder, the aurora borealis, mirages), the work consists of attempts to describe the indescribable. Rickards deconstructs, then reconstructs and transcribes these phenomena through text, light, sound, colour, first-person accounts and re-enactments. At first pass, it's a very restrained and minimalist show, but one that richly rewards proper investment of time and attention. I didn't want to leave.

A friend recommended the Audiograft Festival (12 March - 28 March at Oxford Brookes University and other city locations), which included Gordon Monahan's A Very Large Vinyl LP Constructed in Acoustic Space in The Glass Tank. You sit (alone and very conspicuously) in the centre of eight loudspeakers, where you hear a collage of surface scratches and vintage easy listening records, spinning to create the illusion that you're the hole in the middle of a virtual vinyl LP.

Even better was Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walk. It's a self-guided walk around the Oxford Brookes campus wearing special, sensitive wireless headphones which make the acoustic qualities of above-ground and underground electromagnetic fields audible. From lift control panels to vending machines and cashpoints, every electrical item has its own unique electromagnetic signature. Slightly ominous, but nonetheless a whole new way to experience the everyday.

Looking at other people's work is never easy when you've been obsessing about your own during an exhibition install, so it was a lucky coincidence to be able to spend so much time listening instead.

Oddly enough, the listening theme continued back in Exeter when I went to see an artist's talk by Marie Toseland. Rather than talk through a series of images, she played her own Desert Island Discs, as well as video clips of rapping and beatboxing.  All preparation for a new 'experimental opera' she's starting work on.