Dawn Chorus - by Fiona Campbell (Britain)
Digital recording, 2019.
(You may need to raise the Volume on your computer or device for this)
(You may need to raise the Volume on your computer or device for this)
"...the sound of birdsong fills the room. I close the cell door and my focus shifts to the barred rectangle of light, high up to my left. The sound of birds becomes my image of the outside, and soon those birds are the entire world.
Fields and hedgerows, roads and homes; all are present in this piece. Nature is our constant companion, one that we can always count on, and incarceration goes to great lengths to remove it from the life of the prisoner. Is there any more fitting symbol of freedom than a bird in flight ?
It is fitting that this is the final piece that I encounter on my walk around B-Wing ... it locates me here in more than just a physical sense, and it achieves this by leaving a space between my own situation and the work. I imagine myself sleeping facing that grated rectangle of light that represents everything that is absent. I’d listen to the birds and I’d spend the rest of my life dreaming about the outside world.
Or perhaps I would become inured to such dreams, and instead become wholly institutionalised, learning to fear the outside world as represented by that small rectangle of the outdoors and its birdsong soundtrack." (Trevor Smith, Review of 'B-Wing', an Exhibition at the disused former Prison at Shepton Mallett, Somerset, England, October 2019).
Fields and hedgerows, roads and homes; all are present in this piece. Nature is our constant companion, one that we can always count on, and incarceration goes to great lengths to remove it from the life of the prisoner. Is there any more fitting symbol of freedom than a bird in flight ?
It is fitting that this is the final piece that I encounter on my walk around B-Wing ... it locates me here in more than just a physical sense, and it achieves this by leaving a space between my own situation and the work. I imagine myself sleeping facing that grated rectangle of light that represents everything that is absent. I’d listen to the birds and I’d spend the rest of my life dreaming about the outside world.
Or perhaps I would become inured to such dreams, and instead become wholly institutionalised, learning to fear the outside world as represented by that small rectangle of the outdoors and its birdsong soundtrack." (Trevor Smith, Review of 'B-Wing', an Exhibition at the disused former Prison at Shepton Mallett, Somerset, England, October 2019).