Crossed Wires at Headland Sculpture

 

Off in the distance -- Crossed Wires by Sharonagh Montrose and Helen Bowater

Part of the biennial Headland Sculpture on the Gulf, Crossed Wires is a collaborative piece combining sound and sculpture.  It consists of four wooden elements that suggest the tops of telegraph or telephone poles buried deep into the ground.  We have the perspective of birds in flight on four sets of long suspended steel wires anchored to each element.  Although the sound component actually plays through hidden speakers, the viewer enjoys the illusion that these wires are carrying the sounds, delivering them to the wooden posts from some faraway and mysterious place.   As you walk closer to each wooden crossbeam, composed sounds -- operatic singing, muffled talking, music, and the sounds of nature -- become audible.  As you move away from each pole towards another, the first sounds fade into the background, and a new composition -- faint at first -- becomes dominant.  When you stand in between two poles, you can hear two distinct, conflicting recordings interweave -- like  overlapping radio stations, or a telephone call gone awry, mixed up with the sounds of another conversation caused by crossed wires -- hence the title.

The work becomes interactive; visitors change their position to adjust the sounds that they hear, moving backwards and forwards to create and embellish a tapestry of sound. The recordings have the magical quality of something happening far away, beamed around the world or across time. One cannot help asking, where are the sounds coming from?  The first telephone call transmitted across the Atlantic via undersea cables was a miracle in its day.  Is this sculpture connecting us with echoes from the past, the sounds of the dead, a civilization buried under the ground? Or are the sounds merely from a neighboring island or a village down the road?   Is the headland haunted, or are we eavesdropping on the cell phone signals filling the air around us?