Tintinnabulation

About

“I’d just returned from a wild camping trip on Dartmoor, walked into the at in Bethnal Green, bent down to put the bags on the oor, then stood up into a barrage of internal sound.”

Artist Victoria Coster is one of an estimated 5 million people in the UK to be living with the condition known as Tinnitus. Like many others to be diagnosed, there is no identifiable cause associated with her experience.

Coster’s three month residency sees the culmination of a body of work developed as a result of her time at Kentish Town Health Centre. Arising from the need to find a common language to relate her sudden shift in sound sense perception, Victoria devised a questionnaire for other tinnitus sufferers to respond to. Asking questions such as; If your Tinnitus were to be associated with an object, colour or form what would it be? What does your tinnitus look like? and What sounds would you associate

it with? Together with her own answers and along with the perceived ambience of sound within the building itself, the questionnaire both informed and became the starting point for the work produced.

Coster presents us with moving image, sound, objects, etching, screen prints and drawing, all arrived at through an explorative and experimental process, rooted in the framework of a sculpture practice. The work presented at the Free Space Gallery is also accompanied by digital work made available on Vimeo and Soundcloud. Digital platforms specifically used to highlight aspects of collection within the work and relating directly to PHANTOM and Sounds Like, both of which use footage and sound collected from the internet.

The works viewed could be considered as an extended enquiry into the nature of Self in relation to the constant shifting of sense perception. In the case of tinnitus it is the heightened sense of perceived sound within the auditory system that has altered. The internal veil of constant and uninterrupted noise on a daily basis has forced Coster to not only look beyond sound to nd an internal place of quiet but has also prompted the question ‘What is silence, where does it reside?’