PROJECTION TRAILS
an audio-visual performance @ CCD ArtSpace by Claire Nichols & Fabian Jendle
Thursday 15 September, 2022
From 6th - 16th of September, London-based artist Claire Nichols and Barcelona-based musician Fabian Jendle are artists in residence at CasCaDas ArtSpace. They are collaborating on a performance titled Projection Trails which emerges from Nichols’ series Variations, also developed during her residency at Hangar, Barcelona in 2021.
Across the Variations series, Nichols uses materials that are discarded, and have a sense of being caught in a temporal loop between abandonment and future potential. At CasCaDas, these so far include roof tiles, mirrors, sand, reams of fabric, recycled wood and metals. Each material carries a sense of its past life and function, but also holds an other-worldly quality in its visual and auditory tactility. Often, the materials do not have one set form: they are piles of sand that can be dispersed, roof tiles that can rock and reverberate; mirrors holding transitory reflections, and torch light that creates temporary shadows of their passing traces. They offer the possibility of an evolving relationship; moveable graphic and geometric configurations that open up an abstract space of possibility.
Over the past couple of years, Nichols’ evolving sculptural compositions have entered the field of expanded cinema and foley. Her improvisations with the found materials, torches and mirrors simultaneously cast shadows and reverberate live sound via the attached contact microphones. Working in collaboration with Jendle, they construct environments and soundscapes in which layers of sonic texture can accumulate, saturate, dissipate and be rebuilt. Nichols and Jendle create live audio samples of object interactions which become tracks that Jendle processes via a modular-synthesizer-like setup; spatialising the sound and generating rhythm. In the moment of performance with light, objects and live mic’d sound, Nichols and Jendle create a space for interaction, improvisation and transformation, a space in which the objects develop a new life and language in light and sound.
Claire Nichols is a visual artist based in London. She creates tactile and performative 'scenes' which become meeting points for sculpture, sound and movement. Her Variations project has resulted in performances at Hangar, Barcelona; Space 118, Mumbai; Korai, Nicosia; E.KA.TE / The Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts, Nicosia; Arebyte, London and Enclave Lab, London; and has been supported through a year-long residency at Florence Trust. A special edition book on the project was published by work-form in 2019. Her work was also recognised via the Main Prize of a Solo Exhibition at Barbican Arts Group Trust in 2018, awarded by Florence Peake & Tai Shani. Nichols completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her BFA at the Ruskin, University of Oxford. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint
Martins, University of the Arts London.
http://clairenichols.info
Fabian Jendle is a musician and software developer currently based in Barcelona. He has a degree in theoretical mathematics and a life-long attachment to guitar gear. He focuses on structural aesthetics and attempts to portray them through ambient music and a strong principle of composition through improvisation. Jendle wrote a thesis entitled Quantum Error Correcting Codes at Mexico’s largest university; UNAM. Professionally, he has worked on data visualisation for the United Nations and the World Resources Institute.
https://263.nu
