The Beginners by simon whetham

Collaborative project with Rebecca Joy Sharp
Book publication available here: souterrainpress(dot)bigcartel(dot)com/product/the-beginners

A series of earthworks in Fife, UK visited in 2016 and 2018:

Hazelton hut circle 56o 22’ 55” N 3o 04’ 30” W
Creich hill fort and homestead 56o 22’ 52” N 3o 05’ 51” W
Norman’s Law hill fort 56o 22’ 08” N 3o 07’ 33” W
Drumcarrow Craig homestead and broch 56o 18 ’32” N 2o 52’ 41” W

Rebecca and Simon first worked together in 2010 to make The Clearing (Gruenrekorder 2011) – a field recording of dawn chorus birdsong and live improvised harp, recorded over two mornings in a Liverpool park; meeting again in 2011 for Simon’s project Active Crossover.

Moving to rural Fife in 2014, Rebecca decided she wanted to make work about the process of looking for connection in a new environment. By contrast, Simon continually travels the world for residencies and commissions, forging temporal connections to new and varying locations.
They agreed that a new work could explore these combined experiences of presence, transience and meaning-making.

They met in Fife in September 2016 and August 2018, to visit and record a series of locations that Rebecca had identified as both ‘interesting’ and ‘nearby’: hut circles, forts and homesteads all marked in the Ordnance Survey maps by the distinctive curling script.

The lack of documentation and fanfare – and in some cases, visibility – made these locations ideal for the project; some appearing as an innocuous pile of rocks or a shadow in a field.

They found fragments at each location – in the form of words, phrases, sounds and images – gathered as raw material to be reworked later. In Simon’s final audio compositions, a once-strident voice is worn down; treated as just another texture in the landscape – poking out occasionally like rock through soil. And in its own way the text attempts to frame, name and describe these places – resorting to ever-abstracted imaginings.

Part deep-mapping, part wayward archaeology; wondering what happens to a place when the humans arrive – what becomes of us and what we leave behind. Illusions of power and permanence; unfolding understandings; timescales of change.

We are all of us beginners at some time, somewhere, to someone – most often to ourselves.

Rebecca Sharp 2020

Repurposing environmental sound, space, found objects and salvaged devices, Simon Whetham presents sonic collages that are both meditative and thought provoking...

simonwhetham.co.uk