The works exploit the interaction between a mirror, vibrated with sound, and a laser reflected onto a photographic medium to visualise the audible. By visualising language, presenting it in a way where it is no longer “readable”, the aesthetic component is no longer overshadowed by meaning and a previously overlooked aspect of reality is brought to the fore.


The cause-effect relationship that underpins this process means that, theoretically, it should be possible to reconstruct the sounds that make the forms, from the forms that the sounds have constructed. This direct link between the two iterations of information allows for an exploration not only of the abstract's ability to represent but of the boundary between what we perceive as abstract and what we don't.


This is exemplified in the Signifier/Signified series, in which words that have gone out of use in the English Language are the input to the visualisation process.









Words that have gone or are going “extinct”, occupy a space where they sound like they belong to the language they are from but could equally not be words at all. Much like hearing a language you don't understand, their form rather than their meaning dominates. This quality, the emphasising of the aesthetic of the word over its meaning, mirrors precisely what the process used to visualise them does. Presented alongside the definition of the word, an equivalence and a tension between the abstract form the word creates and its meaning is established.


Language is deconstructed in Units of Sound, where one photograph of each phoneme in English was taken. Phonemes, the units of sound that comprise a language, are at the border between what we discern as a sound or as a word. Between something which has meaning and something which doesn’t. The projection of the laser from the machine, undulating in time as a soundscape emits from its speaker, makes apparent that these seemingly unrecognisable shapes have their basis in something we hear and use everyday.




This deconstruction goes a step further in my newest series Fundamentals. The organic, almost three dimensional forms are representations of sine waves increasing in amplitude. These are pure tones - notes that contain only one frequency or pitch. 


All sounds can be expressed as an addition of sine waves, and as such they can be considered as sound’s fundamental unit. From this perspective, when we make a noise, pronounce a phoneme, speak a word, or articulate a thought - we are rapidly producing selections of these forms. Imprinted onto air, they travel, unseen, in all directions, waiting to be decoded and understood.