soundmarks

An art/archaeology collaboration with Rose Ferraby using sound and visual art to explore and animate the sub-surface landscape of Aldborough Roman Town in North Yorkshire, UK.

Follow the Soundmarks art trail through Aldborough using our map and sound pieces here.

View Rose’s paintings and accompanying sound pieces here.

A limited edition artist book documenting the project is available to order now.

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“We tend to think of the underearth as a silent space, but of course it is rife with sounds both live and archived. Soundmarks lets us hear what happens when we lay our ears to a landscape; the voices and utterances that surface into the skull. It is itself a conversation between two human makers, St John and Ferraby, but its other authors are air, soil, rock, water and time. Together they have all made a fathoming – a sounding-out – of one place that is also many places.”

– Robert Macfarlane

“In Soundmarks, Ferraby and St John have become shape-shifters, sound-sifters and time-drifters. In smudging the boundaries between visual art, sound art, archaeology and creative writing, they also somehow unsettle the identities of the things they discover and create: the paintings seem to have soil clinging to them, the sounds have physical presence in the world, the words they use are as precise and particular as tools, and the earth below our feet is revealed in its storied, supple stratigraphy.”

– Caitlin Desilvey