Duncan Hopkins / MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice

A group exhibition as part of the opening for CMR in Redruth, Cornwall. Featuring four artists. My work consisted of selected paintings and a dedicated room where I took the opportunity to experiment with ideas of painting and sound combined.

“The Biology of Seeing” featured 7 paintings and a 35 minute soundtrack on loop. I wanted to put into practice ideas of an embodied space, and to see how sound altered people’s perceptions of images, and how images and space responded to sound inputs.

The sound piece was structured with found ambient sounds, a voice speaking (channeling), various other voice sections, and tonal brainwave stimulates. The work was a critique of the nature of belief systems, individuality and creativity, with references to instability and potential. It had political implications inherent within the ideas spoken, and provoked the nature of the overlap between the imaginal and the real. Dimensions of the seen and ‘unseen’. This was reflected in the sequential paintings, and I left it up to the viewer to interpret as they saw fit, and to find the relationships (aesthetic, symbolic, emotive).

Responses were varied – the usual; how the sound distracted from the paintings, it grated (It wasn’t designed to be easy listening), it worked. It became an intense space, and I was satisfied with it.