Luminance + Levitation: Acoustic Portals
Larkhall Viaduct, Avon Gorge, Larkhall, Scotland. Photo James Merrell
My obsession with light and resonance began in childhood fantasising that I was Dr. Doolittle. All seasons of the year standing in grassless paddock talking to untamed ponies. Today this is called Horse Whispering, I prefer to think of it as a borderless breath and lived telepathy. It is a tuning searching for a common aliveness free of ontological classification. With hindsight I also recognise that these years of riding my pony up and down the gorges of Avonbank in Larkhall, where the industrial belt of Scotland butts up to 6 ancient confluent gorges and the oldest rail viaduct in Scotland, singing my heart out. But I hopeless at remembering lyrics so howled in overtone laments. Flanked by steep deep cut ravine wall, the bodies of both pony and I rung the same song, the search for a shared harmonic was born.
My current projects, Luminance and Levitation, extend this inquiry into vibrational aesthetics through sculptural form. They seek to liberate art from static objecthood and propose sculpture instead as a living field of resonance, where material, vibration, and human presence converge into shared resonance.
Luminance explores the translucency and resonance of porcelain as both material and medium. Working with glacier and experimental porcelain bodies, I test how luminous surfaces and resonant chambers function as portals for perception. These works act as acoustic vessels of light, inviting the viewer into an experience of attentiveness that oscillates between the seen and the felt.
Levitation investigates acoustic chambers, resonant curves, and multi-player Helmholtz resonators as sculptural breath. These works invite multiple voices to sound together, producing layered harmonics that dissolve the boundary of the individual. Here, sculpture becomes a collective act of resonance—an acoustic portal where sounding and listening merge into a shared harmonic field. Photos of this work will be available towards the end of the year (2025).
My current projects, Luminance and Levitation, extend this inquiry into vibrational aesthetics through sculptural form. They seek to liberate art from static objecthood and propose sculpture instead as a living field of resonance, where material, vibration, and human presence converge into shared resonance.
Luminance explores the translucency and resonance of porcelain as both material and medium. Working with glacier and experimental porcelain bodies, I test how luminous surfaces and resonant chambers function as portals for perception. These works act as acoustic vessels of light, inviting the viewer into an experience of attentiveness that oscillates between the seen and the felt.
Levitation investigates acoustic chambers, resonant curves, and multi-player Helmholtz resonators as sculptural breath. These works invite multiple voices to sound together, producing layered harmonics that dissolve the boundary of the individual. Here, sculpture becomes a collective act of resonance—an acoustic portal where sounding and listening merge into a shared harmonic field. Photos of this work will be available towards the end of the year (2025).
Tintype Photographs (2022), Sound Mirrors, Greatstone Lakes, Dungeness Nature Reserve. Margot Wilson
Led by Professor Johnny Golding and as part of the Radical Matter Research Lab, I participated in a field trip to Dungeness. The stark landscape and the haunting presence of the early 20th-century sonic mirrors have stayed with me, shaping my investigation into resonance in clay, particularly porcelain. These monumental listening devices—built to catch sounds carried across vast distances—embody a poetics of attention that I now seek to translate into sculptural form.
I consider Professor Golding one of the most significant living philosophers. Her work, in dialogue with early Buddhist teachings on ignorance, forms a pivotal axis for my research. Between Golding’s radical rethinking of matter and Buddhist explorations of unknowing, I locate a practice that moves beyond the self and into resonance—where sound, material, and philosophy converge in the aliveness of form.
I consider Professor Golding one of the most significant living philosophers. Her work, in dialogue with early Buddhist teachings on ignorance, forms a pivotal axis for my research. Between Golding’s radical rethinking of matter and Buddhist explorations of unknowing, I locate a practice that moves beyond the self and into resonance—where sound, material, and philosophy converge in the aliveness of form.
Harmonicones Installation Model (2023), as the cones turn tones rise, orchestrally coming together.
Harmonicones (2022–24) explored John Cage’s notion of “impossible silence” as spiral resonance. During lockdown, I turned to wheel-throwing as a daily practice. While experimenting with cone forms, an unexpected ethereal sound emerged, not the one I sought, but another, carrying me into new sonic territory. The project unfolded as an archive of recordings and objects, giving voice to vibrating material emergence as a synecdoche of clay–human connection. The cones, shaped using old credit cards, inscribed a further layer: a critique of capitalist ontologies of commodification and their entanglement with embodied making.
Hand-thrown porcelain cones circulate breath and sound as allegorical spirals oscillating between expansion and stillness. They mobilise a Buddhist materiality as ephemeral, resistant to ontological fixity that destabilises binaries between stable and unstable, subject and object, material and immaterial. The Harmonicones became dynamic portals: resonant forms of breathing that refuse dualism.
The cones extend forward into my Luminance + Levitation project as both sound and light cones, articulating cyclical spiral energy, the seven “inner planets,” and the physics of light cones. In this way they connect Cage’s silence to Helmholtz’s harmonics, to Wittgenstein’s observation that “for one system to serve as a model for another, both systems must have the same degree of freedom.” Each cone becomes a microcosm, a universe of resonance and light, inviting the possibility of shared harmonic experience.
Hand-thrown porcelain cones circulate breath and sound as allegorical spirals oscillating between expansion and stillness. They mobilise a Buddhist materiality as ephemeral, resistant to ontological fixity that destabilises binaries between stable and unstable, subject and object, material and immaterial. The Harmonicones became dynamic portals: resonant forms of breathing that refuse dualism.
The cones extend forward into my Luminance + Levitation project as both sound and light cones, articulating cyclical spiral energy, the seven “inner planets,” and the physics of light cones. In this way they connect Cage’s silence to Helmholtz’s harmonics, to Wittgenstein’s observation that “for one system to serve as a model for another, both systems must have the same degree of freedom.” Each cone becomes a microcosm, a universe of resonance and light, inviting the possibility of shared harmonic experience.
Lament Development
Resonant Agency renders ephemeral materiality as human interconnection mediated by resonant light. M25 Lament for Gaia II is a longtone voice recording made with a vintage Naumann microphone. The video explores the entangled and interdependent nature of electromagnetic corporeality and manufactured electricity. Inspired by Jem Finer’s Longplayer (2000), a Tibetan bowl recording designed to play for 1000 years, the longtone breaths here are based on one-minute yogic breathing cycles and Tibetan throat singing. The lament is continuous, uncut: a breathing out of shame and regret for a planet’s squandered future.
This M25 lament embodies the intersectional complexity of a life experienced as borrowed nervous system and finite breath. My sanctuary for a decade has been a houseboat moored on the Basingstoke Canal, itself once conceived as a waterway to stimulate colonial trade. Her stillness mirrors the underbelly of the M25 flyover, its pillars, trusses, and anonymous graffiti, while only miles away Heathrow crowds the sky and a vast power station hums across the water. Earth, sky, and body buzz in an uneasy chorus. What began as a raw recording in a hide evolved into an urban lament: an invocation of loss, entanglement, and survival.
Yet these laments also mark the beginning of a transition in my practice. They point forward to Luminance and Levitation , a project that seeks not only to mourn, but to lift, to recalibrate breath into collective resonance. Where M25 Lament grieves, the acoustic chambers and multi-player resonators aim to transform breath into a harmonic field, to embody levitation rather than collapse. But where lament records a finitude, Luminance and Levitation moves toward luminosity: the possibility that shared vibration can become a rising force, a sculptural breath that lightens and sensually holds.
This M25 lament embodies the intersectional complexity of a life experienced as borrowed nervous system and finite breath. My sanctuary for a decade has been a houseboat moored on the Basingstoke Canal, itself once conceived as a waterway to stimulate colonial trade. Her stillness mirrors the underbelly of the M25 flyover, its pillars, trusses, and anonymous graffiti, while only miles away Heathrow crowds the sky and a vast power station hums across the water. Earth, sky, and body buzz in an uneasy chorus. What began as a raw recording in a hide evolved into an urban lament: an invocation of loss, entanglement, and survival.
Yet these laments also mark the beginning of a transition in my practice. They point forward to Luminance and Levitation , a project that seeks not only to mourn, but to lift, to recalibrate breath into collective resonance. Where M25 Lament grieves, the acoustic chambers and multi-player resonators aim to transform breath into a harmonic field, to embody levitation rather than collapse. But where lament records a finitude, Luminance and Levitation moves toward luminosity: the possibility that shared vibration can become a rising force, a sculptural breath that lightens and sensually holds.
Predictive Text: Trancing the Third Millennium III (2024) @IBA.ART
My predictive-text practice combines analysis and channelling in an immersive performance of thought, image, sound, and typing. Inspired by Kerouac’s On the Road (1956), Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) and Cage’s Primitive (1942), Predictive Text (2024) is my latest exploration of fiction and astrology prompted by the astrological chart of 01.01.3000. Also leading on from my 1990 4-day continuous Greyhound bus trip from Port Authority bus station, New York, to L.A., California, writing throughout using streaming consciousness.
Using a modified 1976 wide carriage Smith Corona Electric Typewriter the text is typed on multiple 90 cm x 20 m continuous rolls of tracing paper. Periodic sonic recordings of the typing sound designed by Marcus Herne, further explore harmonics and dissonance as interplanetary frequencies moving through the ear, body, and public space. The Peckham installation is a 2 km scroll of streamed consciousness suspended from the ceiling as analogue thought-clouds. Five vintage manual typewriters on child-sized desk units (artworks) arranged in an institutional row, invite the public to sit and type their own text and channel their own visions of the Third Millennium.
The text is written through immersive trance-typing, echoing the Dead Sea Scrolls, Alice Bailey, W.B. Yeats' spirit dictations, and Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous poetics. It operates as both channel and chant as a speculative divinatory act exploring prediction not as certainty, but as courage. This project is now being developed as an AI collaboration text, more of which will be share early 2026.
Using a modified 1976 wide carriage Smith Corona Electric Typewriter the text is typed on multiple 90 cm x 20 m continuous rolls of tracing paper. Periodic sonic recordings of the typing sound designed by Marcus Herne, further explore harmonics and dissonance as interplanetary frequencies moving through the ear, body, and public space. The Peckham installation is a 2 km scroll of streamed consciousness suspended from the ceiling as analogue thought-clouds. Five vintage manual typewriters on child-sized desk units (artworks) arranged in an institutional row, invite the public to sit and type their own text and channel their own visions of the Third Millennium.
The text is written through immersive trance-typing, echoing the Dead Sea Scrolls, Alice Bailey, W.B. Yeats' spirit dictations, and Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous poetics. It operates as both channel and chant as a speculative divinatory act exploring prediction not as certainty, but as courage. This project is now being developed as an AI collaboration text, more of which will be share early 2026.
These are only a few of my key projects I'm taking forward, please refer to my archive pages for other sculpture works and overview.