The English composer Laura Cannell participates in the Raveningham Sculpture Trail with two different pieces.
The Raveningham Sculpture Trail is an exhibition of contemporary sculpture that takes place annually in the summer in the grounds of Castell Farm, a Tudor-style farmhouse at the Raveningham Centre in Norfolk, on the border between the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. This year’s event opened on 19 July and ends on Sunday 3 September, with 63 British artists taking part, creating their sculptures in specific spaces in the just over three acres of the gardens. The composer Laura Cannell, born in Norwich, the main city in the county of Norfolk, has also been present at the Raveningham Sculpture Trail 2023, participating with a work entitled Amplify the Purrrsitive, created jointly with the musiciani, artist and ceramist André Bosman, with whom she has been actively collaborating for fifteen years, in which Bosman has created a ceramic installation and Cannell has created its sound accompaniment.
Amplify the Purrrsitive is about the healing power of cats. It has been suggested in both acoustics and medical research that a cat’s purr has a self-healing mechanism: a series of studies from around the world have shown that cats purr at frequencies between 25 and 100 Hz, which correspond to the established healing frequencies in therapeutic medicine for humans and animals. The frequencies of the purr correspond to the vibrational/electrical frequencies used in the treatment of bone growth, fractures, pain, oedema, muscle growth and tension, joint flexibility, dyspnoea and wounds. The immersive installation of sound and ceramic sculptures consists of one hundred ceramic cats – inspired by the artists’ own cats, Kitty Yolo, Bobo, Hansel and Gretel – and is located in a 4.5 metre wide willow bower/chapel where visitors can enter and stay for as long as they wish, bearing in mind that the musical work lasts just over half an hour.
In parallel to the sculptural exhibition, the Raveningham Centre is also hosting the Amplify Arts Festival, a series of lectures and workshops with artists from 23 August to 3 September, with the highlight being a performance this afternoon by composer Laura Cannell. The concert will be a live performance of Antiphony of the Trees, the album released last year by Cannell inspired by birdsong, which she created by manipulating the performance of a tape recorder with delay and reverb effects. In this concert, Cannell will perform the album live, transforming and diffusing the sound in space to recreate the sound world of the album with the use of pedals and roving speakers connected to the performers, in a kind of immersive journey into the treetops. From slow droning chords to the sound of rapidly flapping wings, Cannell performs sounds of all kinds of birds in the English woodlands: the hoarders, the gatherers and the sacred birds.