“Is it possible to grow electronic sounds, as if they were plants in a garden?” – David Toop

Taking the foundations of a greenhouse as a departure point, the body, dissolving, a duo show by Isabelle Pead and Solanne Bernard, unites the artists’ practices through notions of transformation, growth and care. Set within this incubating interior, the ideas at play swell and retreat amongst the oscillation between organic and synthetic sounds, and hybrid sculptural forms. the body, dissolving is accompanied by an exhibition text below by Lucy Rose Cunningham.

"There is something about the breath you encounter that gives way to shuddering, neck hairs oscillating. Extending its siren call to your mouth, throat, heart. Pulse. The sound comes, serpent-like as it moves, unassuming. Tentacles unfurling their grip; having held in their own voice for so long, they come directional now. Vibrato passing through thin skin to soft palate to cloying pink throat walls. Clandestine liaisons; nervous desires and vices illuminated by auroral light, phosphorescing animalcule fragmented in the air, in the ear.

Today is entering a feeling, of tensions and wetness underfoot; the garden; the garden as a body, as an organ sat within, its / your / our bones to hold growth; limbs to convene / gather / muster, to feel out / through / towards. You listen

and they talk of growing sounds, of breathing of merging, without one sole source. What it might mean to return, to retrace along the metal spine, the glass square - at once containing, at once prone to fracturing -, these expanding forms reaching out / through / towards (/ to retract from? you are both disgusted and aroused), your mind and logic fractal, muscle of light and sound contracting. The body dissolving, the soul loosening.

When they speak of spirit I think arboreal edifice, of bud to branch to stem to root, bound. Containing restlessness, flight, possible potential. Seizing the air to grow within, like plants held in the house, like figures entering the room, like the clasping entrails that have revealed themselves. Simulating another form you wish to absorb, to move beyond a single shape.

At this point the room is humming, a note in the middle lingering, holding you stationary. In the middle, you stand. In the middle of the prolonged note you recall your birth and their passing, and you want / hurt / stretch / polymerise, from all that sound, the truth worded. Re-collection is a slippery viscera that envelops the space, expanding, finding its way through your senses.

You hear then taste then envisage green, carrying you to a cool lawn with setting sun. The red glaze of sunset licks your exterior and you bask; between cold and heat, the ground and firmament, night soil singing. It’s the earth holding you, drawing you back to the beginning / it’s a stranger’s gaze, disorientating new attentiveness / it’s intimacy, slow, grasping for the others air / weight / origin, to disambiguate, to re-exist, to be so raw

feeling out / through / towards, sensing another from a distance at first, mutual reverberations emerging quietly like buds, like once-repressed ferns loosening softly spiked tendrils. Building up in your diaphragm to be released as gasps, as feral cantos, to then retract / lessen / hush, when heat passes, skin sweat-spotted. Gradual retracing to the start. Wavering vocables, you are at the edge of reality again and perhaps you just want to lie down for a moment, convene / gather / muster, in a greenhouse. Let them find you there, suctioned and breath(less)".

Words by Lucy Rose Cunningham