Joshua BILTON

Undersong consists of a three-screen video installation and a sound and poetry walk. The project is rooted in the Isle of Portland in Dorset from where Portland stone has been quarried for centuries and exported for use in building civic, royal and ecclesiastical buildings, monuments, and banks. Through song, touch and quiet melodic performance the piece explores the stones connection to the double, loss, permanence and power.

Sound Design by Erik Medeiros

Holly Corfield Carr on Undersong

A light sweeps over three faces in the dark. To the left, a kiss grazes the lip of a carved stone architrave. To the right, an obscured profile seems to turn towards the shadow. Dead centre and dead on, however, a face looks out. This is something of a pareidolic sympathy, our human inclination to recognise a human face in the rock (or in the moon or in a slice of toast). Two patches of soft light settle like eyes in their sockets. A vertical line convinces as a nose. The quick curve of a chin and there it is: wholly human and looking right at you. But the light moves again, recasting this gentle intrusion to a starker extrusion of form. The face is instantly ― and always was ― not a face but the back of a mask. In all ways, this is a relief.

As the video closes, a chorus of voices struggle against the roar of the machines, adopting a throat singing technique to split the note into two: the note, a sort of undersong, and its harmonic soaring one octave above. A single voice doubles itself, wavering in and out of something almost familiar. It is worth noting that none of Bilton’s masks have a visible mouth but once the bodies and the buildings have gone, their voices break like the beginning of language.

Hackney Urban Geology walk written by Ruth Siddall in collaboration with Josh Bilton.  

The experience of the walk will be multi-sensual. Looking, listening to the sound cairns, reading Holly Corfield Carr’s poetry, feeling the weight of a piece of Portland Stone you carry with you. But we will also be adding layers, the unseen stratigraphy of psychogeologies, for this is also a story in stone, from a tropical lagoon to a layer of rock, from a quarry to a city, to a stone and a monumental mason and a tombstone, from 145 Ma to 2016.

Before leaving, a large c-type handprint of Alignment 1 hangs outside the video installation, showing the artist sitting at the base of William Reid Dick’s 1947 statue of George V in Westminster, Bilton’s head entirely grafted into the plinth’s stonework. Has the body built itself this way or has the building altered the body? Underneath the photograph, a pile of stones brought from Portland invokes the ancient practice of cairn building. Cairns are a human-made structure, used as traditional way markers or as monuments to the dead. They are peculiar artefacts in the landscape, accumulated by collaborators who never meet, changing shape with every instance of contact. As each visitor heads out of the gallery, they are invited to take a stone from the cairn to collectively rebuild it under the second bell tower at Saint John-at-Hackney Church.

A self guided walking tour of sites of Portland stone in Hackney by Josh Bilton and Holly Corfield Carr.

You are invited to follow a walking route that begins at SPACE and ends at St John-at-Hackney Church.  Your route will be marked by six cairns, which are human-made piles of stones, by way of physical sites, poems and sounds that mark a point in the urban landscape. Each cairn is numbered on the map on the back and corresponds to one of the six 'cairn poems' written by Holly Corfield Carr, alongside four 'sound cairns' created by Josh Bilton (cairns 3-6). The first cairn, marked by a mound of Portland stone, is to be found at SPACE.  Take a piece with you and carry it while you walk.  When you reach the end of the route leave your stone on the pile under the bell tower at St John-at-Hackney Church, which marks the last cairn.