Christopher Steenson: Breath Variations

About

Breath Variations is a new body of work created by Irish artist Christopher Steenson (b. 1992) for Flat Time House, the former home of British conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006). Using sound, video, and transmission-based methodologies, Breath Variations will explore the materiality of time – its permanence and evanescence – and the power that attention has over its transmission and state of matter. By manipulating and extending the sonic dimensions of Flat Time House, Steenson investigates the capacity of breath as a ‘least event’ – Latham’s term for the shortest departure from a state of nothingness – to punctuate linearities of time and space.

The site-specificity of Breath Variations was driven by a residency at Flat Time House, undertaken by Steenson in April 2023. Alongside periods of archival research, through which the artist explored the history of the space, Steenson also used this time to gather sound and video recordings connected to the gallery and the surrounding area.

Through engaging with Latham’s archive, Steenson has taken particular inspiration from Latham’s artwork Big Breather (1972) – a structure that simulated the movement of tides using seawater and a bellow system, and which was considered by Latham to present a method of capturing tidal energy. First presented as a proof-of-concept at Gallery House in London, Big Breather was never installed in the proposed location of the North Sea, 12 miles southeast of Arbroath, Scotland.

For Breath Variations, Steenson will present a new sound work, inhale, exhale (oi-io), which will broadcast in synchronicity with the high and low tide times of the East Scottish coast. This transmission-based artwork will explore the circulatory action of inhalation and exhalation by broadcasting both outside and inside the gallery, similarly to how Latham’s book sculpture How the Univoice is Still Unheard (2003), transects the front window of Flat Time House.

Drawing visitors further into the gallery space, Breath Variations will also premier Steenson’s first significant moving image-based work, comprising a spatial sound component that will activate across different spaces of the building. Using video and sound captured during Steenson’s residency, ranging from the minutiae of passing road markings and electrical wires, to emanating fields of electromagnetic radiation, the work’s form seeks to further expand upon the idea of the ‘least event’ by meditating on the relationships between breathing, electricity, and through-lines of time.