Sculpting in Sound: Making Sculpting Lives

Sarah Victoria Turner, the PMC’s Deputy Director, writes about podcasting as a medium that presents new opportunities for capturing the soundscapes of art, sculpture, their materials and their sonic environments, as well as for sharing new research.

The first series of the podcast Sculpting Lives: Women & Sculpture was launched in March 2020, just as the UK went into lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-written and hosted by myself and Jo Baring (Director of the Ingram Collection), its five episodes each focused on the career of an individual sculptor, spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, Kim Lim, Phyllida Barlow and Rana Begum. Over the course of the previous year, we had travelled across the UK, making recordings on our Zoom H4 recorder in places significant for these artists – their studios; museums and galleries where their work is on display; libraries and archives that hold information about them – and interviewing curators, friends, family, as well as some of the artists themselves. In audience feedback, listeners responded positively to the soundscapes of sculpture and sculptural practice and the aural textures of particular places we had created in these episodes. These included the sound of screeching seagulls and the bells of St Ives parish church as we discussed, with the curator

Sarah Matson, how Barbara Hepworth had worked outdoors in all weathers in her garden. We also remember having to almost shout at Phyllida Barlow to make our interview questions heard over the noise of some lifting machinery grinding into action in her busy studio.

Sound is a travelling medium; it is heard when vibrations, which propagate acoustic waves, travel through the air and reach the ear. It can also help us – as listeners – to travel imaginatively, to conjure up a particular place, person or material when we hear associated sounds. This transportive ability of sound was perhaps heightened further when our lives became very localised during the pandemic, a time when actual travel was impossible for many. It is also a medium suited to conveying the spirit of collaboration and conversation which has shaped Sculpting Lives, and the conversational back-and-forth of ideas and dialogue taking shape.

But what does it mean to speak of (and hear) art? And to present research and ideas about visual art forms in sound and through a medium which, conventionally, does not include images? Does art history have a soundscape? And what can thinking through the medium of sound bring to the visual world of art history? What happens to the sculptural, an inherently tactile and physical medium, when described in speech? What does sculpture sound like? What can sound bring to the histories of sculpture? These are questions which Jo and I have been considering as we make the second series of Sculpting Lives, and which also inspired a panel discussion, held this March at the PMC, titled Speaking of Art: Art, Histories and the Podcast (which you can listen to and watch on the PMC’s website). The event was a collaboration with Anna Reid, who was Head of Research at the PMC in 2020 and who developed the new British Art Talks podcast series when in-person research events were not possible due to COVID-19 restrictions. One of our panellists, the historian of sound James Mansell, had called in his book The Age of Noise in Britain (2017) for cultural historians to open up ‘new sensory histories of modernity’, challenging the ocularcentrism that has dominated historical analysis.

Veronica Ryan. Courtesy: Alison Jacques, London, and Create, London.

Photo: Lisa Whiting.

Making Sculpting Lives has prompted me to think even further about the words we use to describe an artwork and the relationship between art, art history, the voice and sound. We now often begin an interview, especially if it takes place in a studio, gallery or museum, by asking our interviewees to describe an object in front of them. Veronica Ryan, one of the artists featured in the second series of Sculpting Lives, took us to look at the pyramid-shaped teabags that featured in her recent exhibition at Spike Island in Bristol, connecting them with the history of the gallery’s former life as a tea warehouse in the city’s docklands. More than an exercise in formal analysis, these descriptive passages often open up discussions about the emotional registers of materials and making. Through these conversations about materials, we learn about lives: those of the sculptures and the locations they

Veronica Ryan, detail of Multiple Conversations, 2019-21, clay, seeds, pillow case and other materials, dimensions variable, exhibited at Veronica Ryan: Along a Spectrum, Spike Island, Bristol, 2021.

© Veronica Ryan. Photo courtesy of Spike Island, Bristol.

inhabit, and of the sculptors and the workers involved in a material’s life story. I’ve also found a new joy in descriptive language, and will never forget Cathie Pilkington looking at Frink’s Horse and Rider sculpture in Mayfair and describing the cascading rivulets of bronze along the horse’s mane as ‘melting like an ice cream on a hot day’. It felt perfect as we looked together and thought about the playful effects (and affects) of that sculpture’s materials.

Research is certainly finding new ears: collecting institutions are looking to attract new audiences, and objects are entering into new relations with words, as artworks are described for listeners through the podcast medium. Podcasts focusing on art and visual culture are now numerous. Some of the most popular include The Great Women Artists, Art Talks, Meet Me at the Museum, Bow Down and many more besides. For me, this form of audio communication has prompted different, and often surprising, ways of describing objects and artistic practices, encouraging an intimacy that is often absent from the other kinds of academic research and writing that I do. When hosting, I actively imagine someone (often a friend or family member) listening, and I speak as if I am talking directly to them. One friend told me that he had listened to the first series of Sculpting Lives while doing his weekly supermarket shop, and that image of accompanying someone as they go about their daily life has stuck with me. The podcast has also created new points of encounter and feedback through the Sculpting Lives Instagram page (@SculptingLives) where listeners leave feedback and ideas about the episodes (something that rarely happens when I publish an article or essay!).

Elisabeth Frink, detail of Horse and Rider, 1974, New Bond Street, London.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Victoria Turner.

In her recent article for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Kate Langrish observes the boom in researchfocused podcasting. Podcasts began to be widely consumed in 2005, when Apple introduced support for them in iTunes. However, it is in the last few years that their popularity has exploded. According to Langrish, in 2019, one in eight people in the UK listened to at least one podcast a week (up 24 per cent from the previous year), and the figure is even bigger in the US where just over one in five listen weekly. As the PMC continues to think about ways of connecting with audiences beyond its physical walls, this industry data suggests that podcasts are an important channel for sharing research.

This autumn, the Centre’s Drawing Room Display will feature material from the PMC’s Library and Archive collections that we have used to support our research for Sculpting Lives. The display coincides with the release of Series Two, which will feature episodes on Veronica Ryan, Gertrude Hermes, Dora Gordine, Alison Wilding and Cathie Pilkington, and a thematic episode on public sculpture and display. There is a growing literature on women sculptors, but many of the artists and their practices featured in Sculpting Lives – with a few notable exceptions – have had limited scholarly attention paid to their work. The PMC has been actively building its collection to support the podcast, acquiring material about these sculptors, and women artists more generally, who were previously not well represented in our research collections. These acquisitions build on an earlier initiative at the PMC in October 2019, in collaboration with Art UK, Art + Feminism and Wikipedia, when we hosted an ‘edit-a-thon’ at which participants were trained how to edit Wikipedia in order to extend and improve the visibility of information about women sculptors online. Sculpting Lives is envisaged not only as a contribution to new research on women sculptors, exploring the artworks, networks, connections and relationships of these artists, but also as a contribution to experimenting with sharing research through the medium of the podcast.

Jo Baring and Sarah Victoria Turner recording Sculpting Lives.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Victoria Turner.