Artist, researcher, and teacher Michelle Atherton has been conducting sound-based research on the Common Field canal side site. Using experimental and electronic devices to tune into the micro sounds produced by the soil, communicating with themselves beyond human perception and the everyday noises of the city.
Image courtesy of Michelle Atherton, 2024.
Michelle Atherton’s work holds a fascination with the complex relations, dynamics and contradictions at play in day-to-day experiences and phenomena. Recent artworks have involved celebratory gatherings paying tribute to the dead across species; alternative imaginaries from the ocean’s depths; examining the nature of everyday irrational gestures and ‘On Demand’ cultures. Her work often uses a remix aesthetic incorporating sound, image, text and installation to create fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world.
The aim is to look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics and new imaginaries. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and shown throughout Europe in galleries, museums, festivals and publications. She teaches fine art to postgraduates at Sheffield Hallam University.
‘Soil Seance Listening Sessions’ by Michelle Atherton at Grand Union, Birmingham, September, 2024. Image courtesy of Michelle Atherton.
‘Soil Seance Listening Sessions’ by Michelle Atherton at Grand Union, Birmingham, September, 2024. Image courtesy of Michelle Atherton.
In September 2024, for Digbeth First Friday, Michelle hosted a series of Soil Seance Listening sessions on the Common Field site, allowing members of the public to turn their senses downwards – using experimental and electrical devices as portals to the underworld. These sessions allowed people the opportunity to transduce, turning one form of energy into another by way of wires, minerals (extracted), amplification and vibratory matter.