Forming of ideas
Dovetailing evolved out of an invitation to participate in a festival in York in 2020, ‘Bloom!’.
“ I had been aware for a while that observing the art of luthiery (instrument making) could benefit my own practise in a number of ways and wanted to explore this further, so I proposed an exhibition around this theme. After spending some time in two luthiery workshops (Hansell Violins and Peter Barton) with the plan of making a series of mobiles in response, I was increasingly intrigued, - not only by the craft of luthiery itself, but by the act of making which it somehow represents. The quietness with which luthiers listen to their materials, craft shapes, and then send them into the world, seemed significant…” (Juliet)
Collaboration
“…Clare and I had worked together before, and decided to collaborate on an installation of mobiles and sound. The festival offered us the use of a medieval church very close to York Minster: Holy Trinity Goodramgate”(Juliet).
“My plan was to create a sound installation so that the exhibition would become immersive: The idea was to record the sounds of careful crafting and tools in a workshop, with the wind in the trees and combine them with played musical notes. I also began to explore filming various stages of the Dovetailing development” (Clare)
Evolving strands
Approaching Sally Beamish, a composer, opened up new possibilities:
“I had had some contact with Sally previously, but I was unaware that Sally’s daughter Stephanie is a luthier and made the viola which Sally plays! We were thrilled when Sally was interested in being involved. Stephanie also then became part of the project as did her collaborator, Linus Andersson, who made the viola played by Sally’s viola partner Sophie Renshaw. There seemed to be within this something cyclical, hopeful and generative and these themes became part of the project itself.” (Juliet)
Lockdown
“The sound installation developed alongside the filmmaking, and after extensive planning to all meet in one place, we arranged to meet Sally, Sophie, Stephanie and Linus in Glasgow (where Linus and Stephanie have their luthiery workshop) . Unfortunately, as we travelled north laden with cameras and lights across the Yorkshire Dales on a bright March day, the first lockdown was announced and the trip had to be cancelled. Consequently much of the filming took place in my garden.” (Clare)
‘Prelude and Canon’
In May 2020, Sally and Sophie made one of the weekly films for the London Mozart Players in which they included a discussion of the project and a remote recording of the piece which Sally has specially adapted for the project, ‘Prelude and Canon’. This recording was used for the promotional film for Dovetailing. “The two instruments in the piece are balanced: they take it in turn to be the lead voice. This non-hierarchical sense of two equal parts seemed to fit very appropriately with the ideas behind Dovetailing.” (Juliet)
Testing the installation.
The festival in York was postponed but we carried on developing the project remotely. “Dovetailing had an initial experimental presence at The Castle Yard Festival at The Manor House in Ilkley in October 2020. It was a showing of a dozen of the first musical mobiles combined with the projection of the short promotional film onto the white stone wall. This experience was recorded and became a springboard for many of the collaborative ideas that followed.” (Clare)
Quietness
We looked for somewhere local for the first exhibition of an installation and settled on the idea of Farfield Meeting House. This small, early Quaker Meeting House on the Dales Way in Yorkshire was built in 1689, the same year as the Act of Toleration. It is an important monument in the history of freedom of belief and in 2018, was chosen by Historic England as one of the ten most historically significant buildings for faith and belief in the country.
“The sense that it is one of the first buildings created for listening to quietness and stillness amid the sounds of nature seemed right for the project and for the times we find ourselves in.” (Juliet)
Dovetailing in isolation…
“I gathered sounds and images for the film. Unable to travel to the various people involved, I asked them to record themselves as reference, so I could intersperse and intergrate with my own material. As the year progressed during the pandemic, I became the recipient of layers born from very different voices and sources. Film was sent from the workshops in Scotland and ancient forests in Sweden; it grew unexpectedly. Working at distance, the collaborative nature of Dovetailing seemed to resonate across all our disciplines with expansive and fresh interaction.” (Clare)
Layers of interaction
The Farfield Dovetailing exhibition took place in June 2021. We were then delighted to be awarded funding by Ilkley Arts to develop a further project involving responses from other artists to the first installation of Dovetailing. The concept grew into an exhibition of Responses, involving visual arts, dance, poetry, commissioned music, improvised music and a new iteration of our Dovetailing installaion. With extra funding from the Ronnie Duncan Art Foundation, we were able to commission poet Ian Duhig to write many responsive poems.