ES Devlin: Mask

A new projection-mapped sculptural work by Es Devlin, for Somerset House and Photo London. res.lab were asked to create the site-specific soundtrack to this installation, bringing the journey to life through a beautiful piece of vocal-led music that was written to emulate the sound of light. Referencing Escher’s work ‘Relativity’, the aim was to weave the musical layers with bespoke foley recordings, blurring the line between music and sound design.

An ovoid, mask-shaped concave form is sculpturally imprinted with dense urban geometry. A river divides the map like a mirror-distorted image of a human brain. A film is superimposed showing hands that peel at projected surfaces, mark up maps and mine through layers of paper, charcoal, clay, mirror, then wash their stains in ink until it clarifies to water. Rinse and repeat: the film plays on a loop: the layers excavated further with each revolution.

The work considers the range of scales of time and space that we simultaneously perceive and chose to remain blind to as we calibrate our position within the period that we now call the Anthropocene: when what we know about the environmental impact of each thing we touch will soon preclude us from touching anything in the same way again.

The hands are six times ‘larger than life’, scaled to match the out-sized, face-like form, like the hands of a giant, trying to find or draw the eyes on its own blind mask. The city is viewed as remote aerial cartography: geometry extruded from earth by un-remembered generations of distant 1:1500 scale hands. The two scales are held together, un-reconciled in the work.

Client
Es Devlin

Video Design
Luke Halls Studio

Spatial Sound
res.lab

Music Composition
Liam Paton & Jade Pybus at res.lab

Vocals
Jade Pybus at res.lab

Projection Equipment
Canon

Sound Equipment
Rossco Ltd.

Construction
Michael Whiteley, Bay productions

Associate Designer
Ruby Law

Project Management
Lizzie Frankl

Engineering
Neil Thomas

With support from
Cannon
Disguise
Photo London
Somerset House
Silent Studios