I attended the A Thousand Words for Weather exhibition at Senate House Library to explore site-specific art and to develop my research into the sonics of intrusion and privacy. The exhibition, curated by Jessica J. Lee and Claudia Molitor, takes place throughout large rooms, hallways and small reading nooks, and features sound pieces and poets of various nationalities dealing with the theme of Weather, its sensory and emotional power and its capricious, ephemeral nature. The exhibition is staged in public spaces, and in order to participate you must listen in spaces designed not only for artist and subject, but for University of London students studying in their own private worlds. Many of the installations are inconspicuous, often simply a pair of headphones attached to a wall or small window booths fitted with low-volume, highly directional speakers to reduce bleed into communal spaces.
The design of the installations mean that many of these students are totally unaware of A Thousand Words for Weather’s existence, and can look, like passers-by did in my parabolic microphone field tests, confused or bemused by a sudden encroachment of their space. One listening booth was positioned a mere foot away from the back of someone’s chair, in a room empty of any other people. The sheer confusion as I took my place directly behind them sharply contrasted the thematic content of the poetry I started hearing through the headphones. My position behind this unwilling subject was concrete, rooted and imposing, locked and steady, a clear statement of intent, a gesture with substantial fecundity. The subject matter of the poetry deal with the fleeting, gentle and ephemeral nature of rain – how a brief, almost dainty episode of showers evokes wistfulness and melancholy. I suddenly understood the potential power of site-specific work, and how leaving an essential self-contained piece of art to the mercy of a public space, full of external agents and non-participants, can allow one to probe for other meanings or for value beyond the immediate art itself. I previously imagined that site-specific art must be inextricably tied to some inherent characteristic about a place, liking the chiming of a cathedral bell or the birdsong in an orchard, but it can be so much more than that. Locational value can be found through the unexpected elements.