Apparition

Apparition is my latest work. It is an improvised, durational, ‘vanishing’ visual art performance carried out in front of a live, in-person and broadcast audience, touring significant historic sites from the medieval period to modern history across Great Britain, including a warehouse with direct links to medieval trade in Norwich city centre, and a rural barn in North Bedfordshire, the site of the first English ‘trial by water’ witchcraft case.

The performance comprises an expansive, large-scale, narrative wall mural, spontaneously improvised, on a sit-specific theme. The visual artist is painting in response to a composer/instrumentalist artist, who is in turn responding to the visual artist, using field recordings, keyboard, and synthesised sound.

Starting with a blank canvas, usually an industrial or warehouse wall space, Apparition builds to a crescendo, becoming a sprawling scene, illustrating a site-specific vignette, relating to extraordinary, often hidden, or forgotten, historic events that took place on-site or nearby.

In addition to the visual art and audio intervention, a prose poem, improvised again by the artists responding to each other, is written line by line, and projected onto the wall space.

As the artwork reaches its climax, the two artists read the poem aloud, accompanied by pre-recorded audio bed created in the performance. The artists then begin to whitewash the artwork, both image and sound, slowly painting over the mural, the audio accompaniment receding, disappearing entirely when the performance is over.