Wapping Project

To Have and to Hold

Billy Cowie, Principal Research Fellow in the School of Art, has just completed the second of three music/sound design commissions for separate visual art installations at the Wapping Project entitled To Have and to Hold.

The Wapping Project is an arts centre housed in the former Wapping Hydraulic Power Station near the banks of the Thames which opened in October 2000. The Wapping Hydraulic Power Station itself was built by the London Hydraulic Power Company in 1890 and used Thames water to provide power to the surrounding docks and throughout the central London area. When it finally closed in 1977 it was the last of its kind in the world. The Wapping Project has presented works by artists such as Angus Boulton, Roy Snell, Maresa von Stockert, Richard Wilson, Elina Brotherus, Keith Haring, Annabel Elgar, Jane Prophet and Anya Gallaccio.

To Have and to Hold is an installation of fetish jewellery by Mark Woods. Woods has created a series of extraordinary objects made from platinum, rubber, gold, silver, human hair, precious stones, plastics, lace, leather etc. While often disturbing the objects have often been likened to Faberge eggs due to their beauty and exquisite level of craftsmanship.

The presentation of such delicate small objects in the imposing industrial ‘gallery’ of the Wapping Project posed immense problems and curator Jules Wright set up a creative team of architects Shed54, novelist and playwright Deborah Levy and composer/sound designer Billy Cowie to work with Woods and herself on solving these issues.

It was firstly decided to construct an enormous box in the space clad with black rubber and pierced with lead surrounded glass peepholes through which the audience would be able to view the objects. Levy set about creating a textual response to the work, ‘Walk into Me’. It seemed most appropriate to set this text in a post-Wagnerian operatic context where the rich almost over-ripe harmonic style would enhance the sensuality of the objects while easily filling the imposing and acoustically problematic space. The text was thus translated into German and sung by the soprano Naomi Itami accompanied by string ensemble.

‘The resulting soundscape, Walk into Me is sung in German by a soprano, whose voice soars above the music as if in search of something, heightening the sense of excitement and tension within the space and intensifying the theatricality of the experience.’

'Walk into Me, Rubber Box' and Mark Wood's fetish jewellery, 'To Have and to Hold' Wapping Project

Natasha Lyons - Dezeen

It was felt important that the spectators should understand the words of Levy’s texts; something that would prove challenging in the extremely reverberant large exhibition space. Part of the construction of the huge box contained a small internal womb-like void which the spectators could enter through a series of rubber flaps and there see further concealed objects while also attempting to touch them by placing their arms into large rubber gloves. On top of an instrumental version of the operatic score sung outside was dubbed a spoken English version of the text performed by live-artist Silke Mansholt and electronically manipulated into a pseudo Warholish type of voice. This version of the music was then fed to speakers in the internal space so it could only be heard from inside. Thus the spectators were presented with two contrasting soundscapes that matched the two physical spaces, the external and the internal, in their relative openness and claustrophobia.

To Have and to Hold ran through December 2009 and January 2010. Cowie’s previous Wapping Project commission Death Drive (to photographs of car crash scenes by Dean Rodgers) ran in November 2009 and the third project, A French Picture Show (to a narrative photographic sequence by Thomas Zanon-Larcher), ends in April 2010.

The Wapping Project is located at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SG.