Skylarking
Exhibition at Arts Catalyst, Sheffield (2024)
’Presented as a constellation of structures to encourage contemplation, rest and listening, Skylarking explores the relationship between landscapes, music and belonging. The works in the exhibition amplify the sounds of the architecture of caves, hills and public spaces in the city, making reference to the echoes and influence of pioneering producers King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry in Dub, ‘Devil Mix’ productions in Grime, and experimental studio techniques of popular Black music of the 21st century.
Historically, Western norms of ownership have informed both music circulation and people’s right to access land. At the same time, Bootlegging, Versions, B-sides, remixes and sampling are musical practices that happen without permission and that keep finding gaps in the language and legal structures of copyright, where originality has been deemed as ‘proper’. These ways of producing and distributing music go beyond borders, spatial constraints and categorisations.
The work of King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry, and others acts as a type of intergenerational citation practice that always happens with and in response to their political and social environment. These musical practices are studio-based improvisations and performances of technology, in which materials from the past are continuously recontextualised across space, time and memory. Holmes explores landscapes, spaces and sounds through the practice of walking and field recording.
In the exhibition, a circular installation featuring 6 speakers amplifies the work of creative writers Wemmy Ogunyankin and Akeem Balogun, voice actor Bel Odawa, musician Seigfried Komidashi and artist Joseph June Bond. Their words, music and field recordings are layered and manipulated in response to the Peak District and its sonic textures, echoes and reverberations. Together, they generate a multisensory conversation, inviting audiences to question the ways we understand urban landscapes and the British rural countryside through and beyond social categories like race, class and gender.
Over the course of the exhibition, a series of workshops, performances and radio shows have brought together artists, writers, musicians and DJs to open up the themes explored in Skylarking.
