My practice to present has been an attempt to describe the vastness of the world/universe we live in whilst retaining the scale of these enormities. Most of my works take on a simplicity of gesture or technique. These are certainly themes I want to bring forward into this body of work.
With regards to the title of ‘Persistent Silence’ I want to make work that somehow negotiates the very nature of sound. We live in a paradox whereby true silence can only be achieved through death and is therefore never experienced. To attempt to confront silence itself would appear to be a losing battle. So this title for me becomes about sound, the ever presence of it and its relationship to us.
The first pieces I am proposing for Stanley Picker’s Studio 1 space deal with the nature of sound waves and the actual space the viewer finds themselves in. I want to use the dimensions of the studio and play back a frequency of sound that has the same wavelength as the particular dimension. Say the studio is 7m x 4m then on the 7m wall headphones would be playing constant sound with an audio frequency of 49Hz and the other wall would have a frequency of 85.75Hz. These pieces would play on the viewer’s experience of the space whilst referencing the persistent nature of sound. The headphones would offer hope to the viewer that silence is possible by their removal yet this act would simply make other sound audible. 
Non-exact versions of the wavelengths at the two ends of our hearing range.
Other work I am considering involves making sound visual. Ideas include digitally drawing the wavelengths of 20Hz and 20,000Hz (average human’s hearing range) to scale and taking A4 segments (see above). A third element could be the drawing of a 344 metre line on A4 paper to illustrate the distance speed travels in one second to scale. These pieces would retain the simplicity of gesture whilst describing sound in its vastness to some sort of comprehendible scale.
All works remain flexible to change depending on co-existing works and general schematics of the space.
By Michael Farrell
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