16/12/2022
Love the way art expands architecture. Land art always inspires and was a joy to collaborate with artist Hannah Sawtell on Sound Mirror a 10m high by 35m deep sculpture commissioned by in partnership with Southend on Sea Borough Council.
Sound Mirror was designed to capture and isolate sound as part of an annual electronic music festival, expressing the performative nature of Sawtell’s work where all who participate willingly activate the Sound Mirror.
Inspired by the nearby Denge Beach Sound Mirror’s, historic forerunners of radar, and one of many acoustic mirrors built on the coasts of England in the 1930s. The ‘listening ears’ were intended to provide early warning of incoming enemy aircraft.
Situated on Two Tree Island, a 640-acre island situated south of Leigh on Sea train station. The island itself consists of grassland, scrub, reed bed and lagoons and supports a wide variety of birds, particularly migrants. It was reclaimed from the sea in the 18th century when a seawall was built around the saltmarsh, the enclosed area being used for rough grazing and subsistence farming. The island is now bisected by a roadway that neatly divides it into two halves. Essex Wildlife Trust now manages the eastern half of the island as a nature reserve. The western half is used as a country park.
The Sound Mirror will draw attention to local historic monuments as well as offer new communal meeting space, valuable way-finding and support managing this valuable country park.
Was a challenge to capture the ‘happenstance’ and build a scale model kit of a mini festival at scale ! Only scale figures could find were from scale model railway suppliers 😃
