Scotland

listen with your eyes and
look with your ears

CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD

Kirsty Stansfield and Aby Vulliamy invite you to take part in a discussion and workshop exploring forms of listening.

The workshop will involve simple exercises aimed at heightening awareness of small sounds and silence. These will be interspersed with informal discussion and short presentations on elements of Kirsty’s artistic practice.

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For both Kirsty and Aby, listening is about attention. Attention not only to what may or may not is being communicated verbally or non-verbally, but also to the wider activities that surround that situation - a process of listening with your eyes and looking with your ears.

Listening is a key aspect of both Kirsty and Aby’s different practices in diverse but related ways. They met for the first time on an allotment where they talked about listening and improvisation in their artistic and musical practice. From these conversations the idea of a workshop emerged as a way of  practically exploring these interests with others. For both, listening presents a relational experience, a framework for working with people in many different situations.

Kirsty’s work involves sculpture, sound, video, interactive installations and lots of conversations. She has worked with a broad range of practitioners from different fields, including choreographer, Colette Sadler, dancers, musicians, and actors. Recent projects have been developed in situations of health care where she has worked with elderly women living in a continuing care ward; a choreographer and actors in a Communication Suite at The Medical School, Glasgow University exploring non-verbal communication to enact authentic experience; and parents and medical staff in a Neonatal Unit working with artist Steven Anderson. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD at the University of Dundee.

Kirsty presented work in the recent Communication Suite exhibition (read more here and here ) and her website offers some detailed information on her past projects, with lots more images and detail. Her research profile from Duncan of Jordanstone gives a fuller picture of her Phd research and links to some other projects she is involved in.

Aby is involved with numerous music improvisation projects and has a very broad view of music, thinking of everything we hear as a form of music, from random environmental sounds, to sounds organised more recognisably as music. Alongside her work as a Music Therapist she regularly performs with Nalle, One Ensemble and the National Jazz Trio of Scotland.

For more information on Aby please see the website for her practice as a music therapist. You can hear her talents as a musician by visiting the myspace pages for the groups she plays with, Nalle and The One Ensemble, or by watching the video below (thanks to www.harmonicrooms.co.uk).