Tansy Spinks

In the Mind’s Ear: Imaginary Scores for Peckham

13th March – 8th May 2016

Imaginary Text Scores for Peckham is a small exhibition of sound-related texts that evolved after listening walks were undertaken in the environs of the M2gallery. 

If the term ‘audiate’ is to hearing what ‘visualise’ is to seeing, can we perhaps train ourselves to be more aware of the aural aspects of our surroundings and memories, by listening and giving priority to our ears?

The audiator/viewer of this exhibition is invited to read and imagine a series of Peckham related sounds that were ‘collected’ by the group on a sound walk led by Tansy Spinks earlier in the year. A series of rubbings taken from shoe soles fills another volume. In addition, aural and oral related excerpts from Muriel Spark’s novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960 are interspersed to give a sense of the sounds of a site-specific past. 

Bound as sets of text scores, every open page may prompt a unique aural moment in the mind, a site-specific sound, the experience of which will have a different resonance for each reader who silently ‘performs’ the sounds for themselves.

Brief biography:

Tansy Spinks is an artist, sound artist and educator currently involved in creating sound works for spaces using conventional and non-conventional sound making devices. She has a PhD from London College of Communication (UAL), MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, BA in Fine Art from Leeds Polytechnic and is a Licentiate of the Guildhall School of Music (violin). Her recently completed practice-based PhD involving live, site specific, associative sound performance, was based in the department of Creative Research into Sound Art Practice at LCC, University of the Arts, London with Angus Carlyle, Cathy Lane and David Toop. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and the National Media Museum, Bradford. She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Middlesex University.

Work can be seen and heard at www.tansyspinks.com