Signals and transmissions

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2022 | Work in progress 

I spent the last week in March in residence at Durlston Country Park in Dorset with Megan Calver, generating ideas and material for our September exhibition Clouded Border. 

This site-specific project draws inspiration from Durlston's history as a lookout and signalling station. Named  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. 

We benefited from extraordinarily clear and bright weather conditions and we made the most of them, going out for morning, afternoon and evening working sessions every day. We imitated clouds, caught light in paper cones, chased bumblebees with an improvised parabolic mic, looked at the stars on moonless nights, read to night-moths, conversed with skylarks, and eavesdropped on bats.  It was an amazing, if exhausting, experience.