Distorting Language Through Scale and Sculpture, and an Exploration of What Mass is and Can Be.

I began exploring Morse Code as a combination of sound and visual material, experimenting with the possibility of developing it into a sculptural form – at the heart of this piece was an investigation into the potential of sound as a material.

Morse Code is both a visual and sonic language or material and as my work explores sculpture through the lens of sound, a physical, tangible, weighted representation of Morse Code opened up an unconventional development in the narrative. I was giving a commonly known/accessible sound a mass that viewers can feel and see through the materiality of the work. I took the language and distorted it through scale – Morse Code usually being written on a small scale by hand or by machine – and by translating the intangible sonic or written code into a physical object, giving it a mass – the word I chose to translate into Morse. This played with the irony of the mass of ‘mass’, the weight of a word and a sound.

Above: Small clay maquette of a sculptural Morse Code.

In the making of these objects I learned a lot about the practicalities of material and the different possible strategies for making work. I first created a small maquette of this piece out of clay, each ‘dot’ roughly the size of a marble, before attempting a larger version. The Morse forms were intended to be made out of concrete – a well-known heavy, dense, industrial material, however after many attempts I found concrete difficult to work with in the rubber mould I had made and also it taking too long to set for the time I had available. They were made of dyed plaster in the end, to give a similar visual appearance and mass to concrete in a quicker, less complicated way. I felt that the forms being grey in colour helped in implying weight slightly more than if they were simply white, undyed plaster. In future I would like to develop them in concrete, perhaps even playing with much larger scales to further distort the language aspect and make the sculpture explicitly about mass – dots and dashes the size of beach balls and human arms would not be recognizable as language. Perhaps creating this sculpture on such a large scale would explore the idea of asemic writing, text that is distorted into illegible words, whilst still referencing some sort of lettering.

Above: Morse Code sculpture laid out in Morse Code, spelling out the word 'mass', photographed on Gylly Beach.

Above: Exploring different layouts of the Morse Code sculpture, photographed on location at Gylly Beach.

My photographs of these sculptures on the beach play with scale purely through the angle the photographs were taken from – I had multiple people tell me that they looked about 50cm in diameter!

Mass has been a key area of enquiry in my practice in recent months. Whilst sketching on the headland by Swanpool recently I began thinking of everything as a separate mass – the sea lapping over semi-submerged rocks a key example of two masses overlapping and intertwining whilst still remaining separate. To explore this visual investigation of the relationship between different masses, I created a video to document mass in both my own work and the landscape itself. The film follows a subtle narrative in parts, whilst remaining slightly abstract in others: a section follows the workings of Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry – the transport of large slabs of granite, sawing it into smaller pieces and following the ‘river’ of sludge from the saw. I also incorporated clips of my Morse Code sculptures filmed on the beach, exploring dropping them to create a sound and impression of mass in the sand.

Above: My film exploring the potential of what mass is and can be in regards to the landscape and my own practice.

The sound I used for this video is a layered combination of the hammering and chiselling sounds of carving my limestone sculpture and the sound of dropping a Morse Code ‘dot’ onto the sand, laid over a background of waves crashing. I repeat this sound throughout the video as a subtle exploration into some of the sounds of events occurring in the video.