TRACES OF LIVING

Traces of Living is inspired by neolithic remains dotted around Caithness, Scotland. These ancient ruins are a potent memento of people who lived here over millennia. When archaeologists dug down into the soil, they uncovered layers of lives one on top of another, fragments of dwellings that shift their shapes through time.

They remind us of a past barely familiar to us, when humanity laid its first footprint on the landscape, and learnt to survive with nature and was subservient to its wild land and weather. All that’s left of lives lived long ago are a few traces and fragments of pottery.

Ground plans of tombs are unearthed, looking like tender wombs laid bare. Perhaps death is just a reversal of birth, and where you go to lie within the earth, you return to the warm embrace of nature as mother.

Working with composer Freddie Graham, we explored archaeoacoustics and theories on how ancient cultures might have engineered and manipulated sound in sacred spaces to enter altered states of consciousness.

Our soundscape emulates this with a very low 4Hz Schumann resonance found in The Grey Cairns of Camster — this cannot be heard by the human ear, yet the body can feel it, in the same way that neolithic sounds aimed to go beyond the realms of the subconscious. Also present is the Helmholtz resonance, like wind blowing across a bottle. Combined, the two resonate around the stone walls of the space, along with other traces of human sounds, perhaps making the unheard heard and resurrecting a little of whatever it was that inspired them.