Band Sensations responds live, to “I’m glad you’re here, just the way you are”(in place of an artist talk)

Toi Poneke gallery

You’re here. I want to welcome you. I want to invite you in.

It’s been a really difficult time, for a while now. For everyone. The whole world is battling a pandemic. Political shifts are huge, seismic. Racism and white supremacy is in the spotlight, in sight, undeniable and needing to be battled and excavated. We need energy, we need connection, we need to feel together, and change together.

This post had the wrong date on it, because I copied it from the original writing about the performance. It said 18th April. In a different world. We gathered together on Saturday 11th July, to make sound, say things, and figure out what an artist talk or response could even look like in this moment. It sure shouldn’t look like me just talking about colour and line I reckon. So this is a recording of a different kind of response. An emotional, thought filled, sound filled, human response to this moment, the best we could do. And then we talked, all of us, in a circle, and it was good. That part is not here – just the performance, but I’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings if you’d like to share them.

The recording is 45 mins long, and there’s a slide show below to accompany it. A lovely accompaniment to a cup of tea and reflection time, or maybe a bit of drawing..

Band Sensations is Siân Torrington, Creek Waddington & Amos Mann. They have met together to make music regularly for six years. The music is improvised around agreed starting points: maybe we will blow a song through wet hands; maybe we’ll swap instruments at the three-minute mark; maybe we’ll have two conventional instruments while Siân ‘plays’ art materials through a contact mic. We often perform a spontaneous, ambient news report about whatever’s going on in the room.

I feel like it’s really appropriate as an artist talk, because the work is about responding; it’s not an ‘alone’ thing. Words are so clumsy, in many ways: we think that they say what they mean and that once we’ve said them, that’s what we meant too. But meaning should be alive, which means presence and shifting, paying attention. This feels like a more decent way to explain my process and respond to the people who have come to see the show, then and there. — Siân Torrington