Clothed In the Soft Horizon Mathew Adkins

This work is based on the painting ‘Fuji seen through the waves off Kanagawa’ by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).Wave paintings on screens and doors where characteristic in the Edo period. Hokusai’s work is a summing up of this tradition. The painting has a quasi-fractal ‘look’ in the self-similarity of the wave tips to the waves themselves, this is an aspect that is exploited in the work. The work presents an interplay between event-gestures constructed in the studio and their natural counterparts. These are modelled after both individual water droplets and the motion of a wave that builds, crashes and breaks. The latter model permeates not only the overall structure of the work but also the spectromorphological design of many of the individual sounds. Anecdotal references included in the work stem from the concept of a ‘flow’ of ideas resulting from the stimulation of the imagination by a given word, in this instance ‘water’. The work is not only a physical portrayal of the flow and motion of water, but also a personal response to it. The work is presented as a continuous but always changing expanse of sound.

Source: 2004

  • Year of composition: 1994
  • Duration of the submitted work: 13:27
  • Production: University of Birmingham

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