Serena Smith's
scripto-visual practice explores the perpetual interplay between lived
experience, and reflective observation. Shaped by systematic constraints and
serendipity, written, drawn, and printed outcomes from her work knowingly play
with a lyrical ambiguity that spills out from the structures of communication.
An interest in language, acts of inscription, and technology, is the focus for
ongoing research that considers the generative intersection between stone
lithography and language.
Attending to the Sound of Sonorous Stones
A digital tuning device, had one be available in the 1950s, would have been very useful for electronic engineer and mathematician Leland Sprinkle. Devoting close attention and many hours to fine-tuning stalactites with a grinding disc in underground caverns, the result of his ingenious labour is the Luray Stalacpipe Organ. Sprinkle can be heard playing the organ online in an early recording (...) Listening closely, before the haunting resonance of limestone speleothems can be heard, is the whisper of static noise, mingling in unrehearsed symphony with spatters of rain, and a continuous high-pitched fluttering that presumably is the sound of scrolling tape as it moves through rotating wheels. Anticipating from the play list folk tunes and hymns, a listener might strain to hear the fragile melody in the background: its faltering pace and unscripted pauses suggesting that Sprinkle's fingers hovered tentatively over the keyboard, and that this electronic engineer of significant accomplishment, was not a trained organist. Momentarily captured however, amongst the quivering cadences, erratic amplification, spectral echo of underground humidity and signal interference, is the distant voice of a soul who spent hours sanding dust from limestone to make music.
Attending to the Sound of Sonorous Stones, academic paper at IMPACT 12, International Printmaking Conference, 2022.
Listen: a
litho-phonic encounter
As a
lithographer, our listener is intimately familiar with the events in the video:
preparing and drawing a lithography stone. And yet she struggles to find
words for the sounds and so stares at the screen for some moments, catching a
glimpse of tide washed sand before a pair of hands come into view. Travelling
across the frame in time to the fricative soundtrack, cupped fingers clasp a
small block as they rotate rhythmically, covering their tracks in a circular
dance akin to the whiskered shuffle of wire brushes on the skin of a
drum. Mesmerised by the moving hands, it becomes evident that our
scribing listener is also an attentive observer. Senses trained on
auditory and visual phenomena, whilst speculatively casting out lines,
summoning up memories, calling for analogies, listening, thinking, wondering,
and waiting.
Figure/Ground, research
presentation at the Material Encounters Summer Colloquium: Uncertain
Knowledges. link>>
A Litho-Phonic Encounter, research presentation at IAS Festival of Ideas: Transitions, Loughborough University, 2022. link >>
On Stone
Under a clear
blue sky the dragonfly takes its last migration through breezeless air.
Touching down momentarily on still water, too late to know that this salty pool
won’t quench a thirst, its fragile wings are pulled down into the sedimenting
basin of an isolated lagoon. Just out of reach from the coast nothing
leaves the stagnating pool and warmed by the sun the water slowly evaporates.
Under the same
sky 150 million years later, in a territory now under the jurisdiction of a
place called Bavaria, the once calm reef is now land with a settled population.
Business thrives in a town becoming renowned for its rich deposit of finely
sedimented limestone and quarry beds are excavated to feed a growing demand for
this now valuable natural resource being traded in the printing industry. And
once again, by chance, the small creature’s last journey comes to light, each
detail of its flesh depicted in the smooth surface of the soft limestone
matrix.
'On Stone'
full text published in Inscription: the Journal of Material Text -
Theory, Practice, History. link >>
Ekphrasis:
inscriptions on wood and stone
As the drawing
progresses I wonder if the hands of Celtic scribes also tired, whilst scoring
the lines of Ogham text into fragments of wood. Cutting short repeated grooves
against the grain an effort would have been felt, different to that which
allowed the tool to willingly travel along pathways of growth. Perhaps
they too made use of a device to control the errant gesture, and aid production
of measured lines of written language (...) Traversing the topography of this
substrate, the tracks of these movements cluster and intersect. Lines of
travel collide and converge. And as the tracing and re-tracing repeats and
returns, left within the membrane is a manuscript that documents journeys taken
and territories charted. Laid down in the process is the fragmented text of
notation - a choreographic inscription in which might be glimpsed, an arabesque
performed in the nexus between generative systems, time, and the intentions of
life on the move.
Full text
published in IMPACT Printmaking Journal. link>>
Ecdysis
At first glance,
not to disturb the ground I trod carefully, thinking the creature might still
be there. But on closer inspection the snake had gone, eased itself out, neatly
shed the skin, and moved on; leaving behind this translucent doppelganger, a
ghostlike facsimile of every scale. For millennia,
this elegant undressing must have been repeated. Remembered in the tracery of
this discarded husk; imprinted in the geometric design of interlocking
filigree; duplicated in each cell of the intricate patina; returned to and
replayed, each time the same but different; the force of nature’s habit.
from
the Reside residency. link>>