Clouded Border

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2022

I'm delighted to announce details of a forthcoming installation and live event to take place at Durlston Country Park, Dorset, in September. This site-specific project, made with Megan Calver, draws inspiration from Durlston's history as a lookout and signalling station. 

Named Clouded Border after a variety of night-flying moth found on site, the project also references an innovative radio-based navigation system developed in part and deployed at Durlston during World War II. Known as Oboe, it allowed RAF bombers to precisely locate targets in Nazi-occupied Europe -- at night or in heavy cloud or smog. 

Durlston's history as a site for the transmission and receipt of signals goes back even further: Marconi carried out some of his early experiments in wireless communication from the castle. It also has a lighthouse and a defunct foghorn. And then there are the diverse signals exchanged by plants, insects, birds, wind and water at Durlston – many of them undetectable through normal human perception.

The September exhibition is open for two and a half weeks. For our closing event, we've commissioned oboist Paul Sartin to play a short piece composed especially for the project, based around the sequence of Morse signals transmitted to aircraft via the Oboe ground stations.

   

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver: Clouded Border
The Belvedere, Durlston Castle, Durlston Country Park, Lighthouse Road, Swanage BH19 2JL 
Thursday 8th – Sunday 25th September 2022
10.30am-5pm daily 
Meet the artists: 23rd – 25th September, 2pm-4pm daily, at the Belvedere
Live event: Saturday 24th September, 2.30pm, with oboist Paul Sartin at the Belvedere

Having begun during the 2021 lockdown, this project has been a long time coming to fruition. Initially working remotely from the site (and each other) we generated scores and actions based on the Rangers’ Daily Diary. We then spent several days on site in June 2021, getting to know Durlston County Park, its inhabitants and its custodians and were offered a week-long mini-residency at Exeter Phoenix to develop our ideas further. We'll return to Durlston again in late March 2022 to start producing the work for our on-site exhibition.