Hearing Shadows, Wordless Light is a project that aims to provide a powerful immersive musical experience created via responses to art installations by world-renowned artist James Turrell. Tremenheere proudly houses two James Turrell installations; the Skyspace and Aqua Oscura.
This project is funded by Arts Council England, National Lottery Project Grants with support from Research England and Falmouth University and devised by composer Jim Aitchison in collaboration with a remarkable team comprised of violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Neil Armstrong owner of Tremenheere, film director Malene Sheppard Skaerved, filmmaker Immo Horn, pianist Roderick Chadwick, and the Kreutzer Quartet.
The project has been taking place in three stages, in the form of creative workshops. The first happened in September and saw Peter Sheppard Skaerved (solo violin), Malene Sheppard Skaerved (film direction) and Immo Horn (filmmaker) at Tremenheere for the first day of creative work in the Turrell Skyspace and Aqua Oscura, working with the composer and Tremenheere Director, Neil Armstrong.
The day was spent filming performances of the composer’s first sketches for the solo violin piece after the Skyspace, Aperture, then interviews and discussions between Jim Aitchison, Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Neil Armstrong and Malene Sheppard Skaerved. Also focused upon were wider issues concerning landscape, music and art, the violin, and Peter Sheppard Skaerved’s Knowledge Exchange project supported by Research England which we were able to bring into wonderful coincidence with Hearing Shadows, Wordless Light.
The second workshop will see the Kreutzer Quartet and Roderick Chadwick will be at Falmouth University later in the Autumn of 2023 to workshop material from Jim Aitchison’s new piano quintet, Transience Patterns, with students from Falmouth’s AMATA arts center, which the composer is creating in response to Aqua Oscura.
We’re delighted that the Main Performance Event will occur in the Skyspace and Tremenheere Gallery early next year.
Audience members will be encouraged to visit both the Skyspace and Aqua Oscura earlier in the day. Falmouth University will be capturing the performance event on film and will create legacy digital content, including film and VR experience.
“Everyone who enters these extraordinary installations by James Turrell brings something unique of themselves into these primal spaces, resulting in a strange paradox of experiencing something both vastly impersonal and intimately personal… In particular, the psychological-philosophical resonance of being enclosed in the ‘Aqua Oscura’, in a darkness more profound than anything encountered since before one’s birth, and then not again until after the eyes close finally, is an experience beyond words, making that moment when the brain just begins to apprehend the vision of the tree canopy and sky emerge from the darkness even more remarkable”… continue reading: https://bit.ly/HearingShadowsWordlessLight
Watch an interview between composer Jim Aitchison and Violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved here.
Join Jim Aitchison in the Skyspace to hear more about the project and the installations here.