The breakthrough in Deborah Loxam-Kohl’s war with noise took place as she attempted to carry on a conversation in a small cafe with a concrete floor and bare walls.
Though she was standing only a few feet away from the person she was talking to, the noise-sensitive artist couldn’t hear a thing.
“It was just this combination of concrete floors, high ceilings, blank walls and that reverberation of noise,” she explains.
“I looked around, and it was a small space, and I thought, ‘you know, it wouldn’t make much effort to do something to improve the sound.’”
Soon she was dreaming of noise-dampening installations with scales, or ridges similar to those on the Sydney Opera House.
This weekend, her first experiment in fusing noise control with art gets its unveiling at the Oxygen Art Centre, where she’s been the artist in residence for the past two months.
The Sound of... (silence) takes its inspiration from vertical gardens. A curved wall is filled with sculptures reminiscent of flowers, seed pods, leaves and buds, all built or carved from felted wool.
Because most noise-control materials are just “a big chunk of foam,” Loxam-Kohl’s goal was to create something “teeming, organic, thriving.” And as the first buds and leaves began to appear, the sounds in the gallery — once a room with nothing more than a concrete floor and bare walls — began to change.
“Before it was kind of like a tin box,” she says.
The completed project, however, gives the noises in the gallery some shape.
“It’s almost standing at the mouth of a cave feeling. That experience of noting how different the sound is from behind you to in front of you.”
This is the first major installation Loxam-Kohl’s undertaken in years, though she’s curated several in the Oxygen, and more when she was the inaugural curator at Touchstones Museum and Art Gallery.
Since leaving that post, she’s been leading an inventor’s life, researching and patenting a device which makes three dimensional felted forms out of wool. And while that device was used to create many of the floral-type pieces in The Sound of, it’s sometimes proved to be a double agent in the ongoing sonic battle.
“I had it running for 10 minutes and was like, ‘no way!’” Loxham-Kohl laughs, pointing to a small closet where the din of the machine is relegated. “The irony of it. I’m here doing this installation on improving sound quality, and then there was this ruckus created by this thing.”
The Sound of... (silence) opens tonight at 7 p.m. and is on display through the week-
end at the Oxygen Art Centre.