Little Sound | Charlie Godet Thomas

About

Traditionally, a sonnet is in praise of something (or someone), in this instance, those “somethings” are the easily overlooked moments, the little sounds, which are too often drowned out by the increasing dominance of “big noises”.

At the heart of 'Little Sound' is the installation 'Dysfluent Song (Water)' (2023) which explores the musicality of a failing shelter, it’s a work in which the sound of poetry, and the poetry of sound overlap. The work consists of metal pans which sit on the floor catching drips of water, together the two elements play a gentle chance-based music which echoes through the space. The pans have also been worked into with short texts cut directly out of the vessels, succinct circular poems which try to imagine what other sounds might be summoned in our imaginations by the rhythmic dripping sound. 'Dysfluent Song (Water)' also mirrors some of the percussive taps and clicks from the articulatory structures of the glottis, tongue, teeth and lips, this reference to the normal operation of bodily production, and of speech production, again brings into focus the bodily and the built, the spoken and the written.

Throughout the space Thomas also presents works from his ongoing series 'Fix'. These delicate assemblages make use of collected pieces of card, magazines and paper which have been saved and catalogued from the making of other  paintings, drawings and collages. Closer observation reveals that the frames of these works, are in fact boxes of used photographic paper. The title of the series refers to the manual photographic process of rendering an image to paper. In these works, the images rendered are sculptural, held in stasis in a clear pool of cast rubber each of which has its own visual musicality. 

Writing a sonnet is to write within a strict structure, whilst attempting to transcend it. The poet's voice bends the form to its own will, instead of obligingly succumbing to the form’s demands. In this series of works, Thomas writes his own rules of making, impressing them on this body of work whilst also attempting to transcend them.