Part 2 - 7.12.21
Part 1 - 21.12.21
Imagine yourself here, the night all scattered around you.
A Line of Tiny Soaps is an audio work built from text, field recording and sounds. Listening returns to indeterminacy and the night, landing in time for the winter solstice. Part 2 will be released first on the 7th and Part 1 will follow on the 21st December, when the gradual closing in of darkness stops, reversing us out of the present, week, month and year.
What would it be like to live inside one type of sound for a whole life?
Textures of ‘found sound’ are combined to score a polyphonic voicing of text. Where ‘found sound’ is normally meant as the use of ‘noise’ in musical compositions, here, it’s extended to include field recordings at gigs or other live events. Music fighting for its place on the street through closed car windows, or ‘found’ outside nightclubs.
When field recording is a link between land and sound, time begins to bend and pull itself into unlikely shapes. Where we hear a song sang (in Irish and English) in Ballycastle in 1963, we might then hear the smoke machine on the dancefloor of Thompson’s Garage, Belfast, filling the room. Music and celebration thread throughout the work as reflection on the contemporary mid-winter rituals we continue to take part in, winter solstice having been celebrated for thousands of years.
Describing ‘two states’, the text in A Line of Tiny Soaps leaves ambiguous whether the ‘two states’ spoken of are emotional states or political entities. Driving words into sentences and performed in a process of sense-making and unmaking, the writing is informed by and formed of various research questions, such as the changing narrative in Belfast around learning the Irish language, and the position of language in relation to speech, reading as listening.
Whilst not on the surface close to conversation, the work considers the loop created where speech informs story, and the stories that become history. A close reading of the everyday mixes with small fictions set in school or the living room. We might encounter imagined artworks screened at the top of a mountain, before returning to the street in stereo sound.
Rather than being held in opposition, A Line of Tiny Soaps gathers the idea of recording as document, and recording as an act of creation. The connection between these ideas is also reflected more broadly in the practice of the writing itself; down to the minutiae of written description. The friction between forms expands questions of how sound composition can illustrate words, or repel them. Where quietness does not connote weakness, and loudness is not a suggestion of strength.
Lucie McLaughlin
Lucie McLaughlin is a Belfast born artist, writer and critic. Her research is grounded in thinking around the entangled relationship between world and words, connecting with the idea of an ‘art writing’ practice that is placed in relation to both text and artistic outputs, which she realises in forms such as moving/still image, sound, writing and performance. She is interested in how the immaterial architectures of language and art exist in proximity to each other, where language can be made unfamiliar by a collapse in distance between the ‘ordinary’ and the imaginative, and how certain political atmospheres and socio-psychological states that in themselves cannot be easily articulated, emerge through practice. Since 2020, she has been completing the MLitt in Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art. Her book, Suppose A Collapse, was released in May 2021 with JOAN, a new publishing project for interdisciplinary artists’ writing. She is a 2022 Research Associate with CCA Derry~Londonderry.
A Line of Tiny Soaps was commissioned by Catalyst Arts Belfast for release in December 2021.
Written and edited by Lucie McLaughlin
Including recordings at gigs by Gordon Bruce and Anna O’Neill.
Vocals by Sara O’Brien, Megan Rudden, Cat McClay, Éiméar McClay, Alex Misick, Lucie McLaughlin.
The artist wishes to thank Catalyst Arts, Tara McGinn, Paul McAlister, Misa Brzezicki, Art Writing GSA, Daniela Cascella, GLARC, CCA Glasgow for the recording space, all musicians and voices, and everyone who offered descriptions of presents they gave or received.
All images Lucie McLaughlin 2021.
