Listen
Mixed Media
Listen
There is a stillness here
You can hear your heart
If you only listen
These images are from the Listen project which is inspired by the Sound Mirrors at Lade Pits in Kent.
The images have been hand finished with gold and copper leaf and then sealed with cold wax.
Click here to read more about this project
Photographing these items accurately is difficult due to the reflective nature of the metal but the images hopefully give an idea.Images are in a small “variable” edition of 5. Each will be unique due to the nature of hand finishing.
To see the non-gilded images from this project please click here
Listen
On a gravel marsh, near Dungeness, stand huge concrete structures known as “Sound Mirrors”.
They were built in the late 1920’s as acoustic devices to listen for approaching enemy planes. There are three of them at this particular site, two dishes of 20 and 30 feet diameter and a third curved wall 200 feet long and 26 feet high. Microphones were attached to the curved surfaces and an operator would listen to the sounds and try to interpret their meaning. However, by the mid 1930’s the new Radar technology rendered these devices redundant. Today they sit in splendid isolation in the bleak landscape – crumbling monuments to human ingenuity.
As the concrete degrades, so the metal reinforcing grids of the structure have started to become visible making strange heiroglyphic shapes. At various times the site has been used as an army training ground, so some areas are peppered with holes and other collateral damage. A visual representation of their history.
I was drawn by the sheer strangeness of this place and the idea of the mirrors still mutely listening but with no-one listening to them. It feels as if all those lost voices have somehow become part of their fabric.
Now as you stand among the mirrors you hear the lapping of the water and the cries of seabirds as the gravel shifts beneath your feet, and maybe, just maybe, the echoes of lost voices whispering in the rushes.
There is a stillness here
You can hear your heart
If you only listen
