As part of the development of Phase 2 of Project Tullie, the museum identified the need for an impactful, innovative, large-scale art installation to take pride of place in our new welcome area. We wanted the work to respond do – or sit in dialogue with – Tullie’s collections and celebrate either Carlisle as a city of nature, history or industry.
To do this we collaborated with Arts&Heritage, a fantastic team who link contemporary artists to heritage organisations. Arts&Heritage compiled a longlist of artists they felt would meet our brief and invited them to submit proposals. These proposals were then shortlisted by a team of staff and members of our Community Board. Three artists were invited to work up their proposals further, with Serena Korda’s eventually chosen. The team loved the unusual link to Tullie’s natural science collection and felt the aesthetics of the piece would work perfectly in the new welcome area.
The following Artist Statement gives Korda’s insight into the development of the piece:
“Hold Fast, Stand Sure, I scream a revolution is comprised of a cluster, or fairy circle, of hand-made hanging porcelain mushrooms. The mushrooms were originally designed as bells that could be played to form a haunting mushroom choir.
Mushrooms are imbued in our consciousness as grotesque, magic and poisonous; closer to humans than to plant life, this confusing specimen holds us in rapture and fear. They also suggest a “radical mycology” in the way that they grow and live, creating possible solutions to our impending extinction. As such Korda harnesses the power of these extraordinary organisms, using them to investigate her interest in primitive impulses, invented tradition, and our skewed relationship to nature.
Korda has created a new, site-specific, sound piece to accompany the installation at Tullie House. She has long been interested in ‘thin places’, anomalies in the landscape which were viewed in pre-Christian times as access points to the afterlife. As such she made field recordings in and around Carlisle in these places, all of which were suggested by people living locally. Korda then collaborated with the musician Chris Egon Searle, using these field recordings in conjunction with a recording of the five main mushroom bells being played, to compose a piece of generative music. The term generative music describes a musical score that is ever different and changing and is created by a system usually generated by some form of artificial intelligence (AI).
In making this soundscape Korda intends to embed the installation sonically in both the landscape and community of Carlisle. The mushroom bells are microtonal, out of sync with the standard tuning of scales. In their somewhat dissonant tones there is an underlying chaos held together through the meditative structure of the soundscape. The soundscape encourages ‘deep listening’, a technique in which you begin to understand your environment through listening (which is distinct from just hearing). Korda envisages the installation as firmly ‘rooted’ in the locale but also operating as a wider call to arms in realising the power and animism of plants and fungi; inviting the listener to contemplate the deeper truths and radical answers these organisms offer in an era of environmental crisis.”
