Straightening out the petals

straightening out the petals

This six-month project has led to Houston questioning how nature might nurture us? And how has the material world moved towards or away from this?

In Houston's continuing experimentation with sound, the artworks creates atmospheric soundscapes, exploring the way in which objects absorb or become a part of their environment.

The project began with Houston reappropriating the age old Jack in the Box to explore what we are attracted to and the sinister underbelly of it. Drawing on themes of inequality and poverty that run throughout much of Houston’s work, the artist encouraged the audience to revisit traditional motifs and symbols in our society and consider what they represent.

With Houston's artwork Lunar, Liminal Music Box: Between Pain and Protection, Comfort and Fear (2018), the artist contrasted recorded sounds from the rhyme ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, which dates back to the 1700s and originates in cockney rhyming slang (weasel and stoat for ‘coat’) from the poor at the time pawning their coat for money in hard times. Swans, a symbol of elegance and fierceness and an animal owned and protected by the Crown, wind themselves around the reappropriated box.

Additionally, Houston's artwork A thing for feathers (2018) is a recreated bird bath, inspired by the artist watching and recording her niece and nephew making their own in the garden, drawing back to innocence and affinity with the natural world.

Raging seascapes are captured in Houston’s photography and video work titled Waves (2018), depicting the conflicting excitement and dread that water can evoke.

STRAIGHTENING OUT THE PETALS EXHIBITION

Newalke Houses Museum, Leicester, UK
18 - 27 August 2018
Press release
More images from the preview

JACK IN THE BOX WORKSHOP

Newalke Houses Museum, Leicester, UK
21 August 2018
Images from the workshop

SONIC ADVENTURE WORKSHOP

26 August 2018
Newalke Houses Museum, Leicester, UK

This exhibition and its public programs were part of Leicester's City Festival 2018.

This project was supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Leila Houston, Lunar, Liminal Music Box: Between Pain and Protection, Comfort and Fear, 2018. Sound, Arduino, wood and clay. Recorded sounds, edit and composition Leila Houston. Synth score created by Andrew Johnston. Technical support David Wilson Clarke and Dan Cowlam. © Leila Houston.

Interact'18 preview evening featuring Lunar, Liminal Music Box by Leila Houston. Photo by Sean Clark. More images from the preview.