Opening up The Luminous Envelope

Gabrielle Hoad | The Luminous Envelope | 2015

Last year I was invited by Exeter University's Arts & Culture team to reflect on work I had made as a result of working with the university's Environment & Sustainability Institute (ESI).  The work appeared in an online exhibition called Catalyst. 

I chose to feature images from The Luminous Envelope, a series of photographs I made in 2015 in response to a collection of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. They relate to my interest in the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that assists prediction or understanding, which began back in 2014 with the ESI-sponsored project Foreign Soil.

As a result of revisiting this work, and at the request of the university, I began to write about the work. Interalia magazine have kindly published the results in their 'Emerging ideas' section, where I reflect on the notion of 'boundary objects' and models as types of fiction. This writing is something of a work in progress, but it felt important to bring it to a concrete form, from which I could build future thinking and making.

https://www.interaliamag.org/emerging-ideas/gabrielle-hoad-the-luminous-envelope-visualising-the-invisible/

High wood

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2022 | Work in progress - bell of an oboe

For Clouded Border, Megan Calver and I have been researching Oboe, an innovative radio-navigation system developed and deployed at Durlston during World War II. The system directed aircraft to targets in mainland Europe that were obscured by cloud or darkness.

Curious about the precise signals used, we cross-referenced a number of sources – including recordings from the Imperial War Museum and technical papers by Oboe’s inventors – to come up with a definitive score for the coded Morse sequence that would have been heard by RAF pilots in their headsets. The signalling tone was said to mimic an oboe, hence its name. We’ve now commissioned an oboist - Paul Sartin - to create and perform a new contemporary sound work for the exhibition based on this score.

The name of the musical instrument itself derives from the French haut bois or 'high wood’. We are intrigued by its correspondence to the wooden Mosquito planes chosen to carry Oboe navigation equipment. Mosquito aircraft were capable of flying at sufficient altitude to send and receive radio signals over long distances. So they too were ‘high wood’.

However Mosquitoes were too small and light to carry many bombs and so usually acted as pathfinders, dropping flares to mark the targets for the heavy bombers that followed.

Paul will perform the piece live in the exhibition space at Durlston Belvedere at 2.30pm on Saturday 24 September.