Marie-Michelle Deschamps: Don’t trip over the wire!

• Jennifer Owen
• 17 August 2014

This article is from 2014

An information overload undermines deliberately enigmatic work at the Edinburgh Art Festival

Marie-Michelle Deschamps’ Don’t trip over the wire! is the latest work produced for the Collective Gallery’s ‘Satellites Programme,’ a development programme for emergent artists in Scotland. Deschamps has produced a sound installation, which emanates strange guttural noises, rhythmic sounds and vibrations around the gallery.

The exhibition is accompanied by introductory notes and a long essay by Laura Yuile, another participant on the ‘Satellites Programme’. In the essay, Yuile elucidates the influences on Deschamps and compositional aspects behind the work, which was based partly on the linguistic efforts of the author Louis Wolfson. ‘Adopting a similar approach to that of a graphical score, the artist has invited the musician and performer to have freedom of interpretation, giving up a certain amount of control over what the final output might be,’ Yuile suggests.

While the essay is a useful explanation of an enigmatic work with much theoretical basis behind it, by directing the reader towards a particular interpretation of the sound they experience, it acts in conflict with the unspoken intent of Deschamps work: to listen and interpret it on our own terms.

Collective Gallery, 556 1264 until Sun 7 Sep, free.