Bethan Huws in conversation with James Lingwood
London, 18 May 2004
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Long Sands, Tynemouth, Newcastle Upon Tyne
"Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." (Finnegans Wake - James Joyce)
JAMES LINGWOOD: When did Singing to the Sea begin to take shape in your mind?
BETHAN HUWS: It began with your invitation to the TSWA - Four Cities Project in 1989, so it was some years before the work was actually made. I followed the spirit or logic of the title: the Four Cities Project. It inspired me, the vast vision it conjured up in one's head like the title of Charles Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities, it shares the same grandeur or largeness of vision. I then looked for what these four cities had in common. Derry, Glasgow, Newcastle and Plymouth are all coastal or near-coastal cities. What they shared was the sea. A first location was established for Long Sands, Tynemouth, Newcastle Upon Tyne and at that time we realised that the project would need more elaboration. It was then taken up by Artangel in 1991. This was the very beginning of the project. The notion of the sea and the city are conceptually linked, the vision of a liquid moving mass... of people.
JL: Juxtaposing two ideas of vastness - one made up of people, the other without people.
BH: Yes that's it, although not quite so straightforward.
JL: Is being given something to work with useful to you - a place, a context?
BH: I very much started from site-specific practice. What I found useful is that what is yours and what is not yours become quite clear. I had to learn or relearn to make things that function independently of an environment and are more dependent on context and art discourse or art language in general. But also in that period, I had made a work where I chose the entire site, like the piece made in a Frankfurt park where there wasn't any structural exhibition at all.
JL: Your work up to this point had mainly been interiors - in your studio, at the Royal College of Art, a number of works you made with floors. So Singing to the Sea was a very different proposition: you moved from working in an environment which was contained and controlled, where you control almost every aspect of your work except perhaps the light, to working in a place where you had much less control.
BH: I didn't experience it as such a big change at the time. In 1989 I had been invited to Clisson in France and made my first outdoor work in extensive parkland. At first I was completely lost and it took a lot of effort to make a work.
JL: What gave you this sense of being lost?
BH: The type of information entering your brain or system is not the same; the sheer quantity is much greater and the rate is much faster. You suddenly change as if from one day to the next from an environment that consists of light fixtures, window frames and hard concrete floors to running streams, grass under your feet and no light switches.
JL: Is the comparative lack of control interesting to you?
BH: No, not at all. It's very unsettling not to know exactly the ground or base, the cause of your actions and decisions.
JL: When did the idea of bringing the singing human voice to a place come to you?
BH: Once the sea was established the voice followed on naturally. The sound element would have made me immediately think of human song. Sound carries over vast distances: originally the idea was to reach those other three cities. There's something very ancient about shouting to each other over vast distances. It was then, during my first visit to Newcastle when I took the Metro straight to the sea that this single singer become a whole group. The most directly related thing to singing... is something I'd often noticed about the pop videos that were current throughout the 80s, and which still continues today. The presence of the sea in the background is almost like a backcloth: we never hear it. What we see is this immense, beautiful, wild, natural phenomenon and what we hear is the human voice, an equally wild, natural phenomenon.
JL: Up to that point, your work had been characterised by silence - they were very still, contemplative places which seemed to be more concerned with issues of perception. Bringing in sound as an active material was quite a change.
BH: I spent time investigating the way I worked and was curious about such processes. My own speech was very much part of these structures. For me, therefore, there is not such a huge difference; I don't see it as a change. The sound was always there in my own speech, in what was passing or running through my head at the time of each construction.
JL: You decided to use a very specific sound, an archaic one - the Bulgarian women singing.
BH: In 1989 there was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing fall of communism, and there was an immediate influx of eastern European music played on London radio. I had seen a Kate Bush video that featured a group who were running across a tempestuous Yorkshire moor. It was like in the Greek myths or Shakespeare - describing our tormented, conflicting thoughts through the weather. I think they were Bulgarian. Anyway, this sound marked me deeply.
JL: You have talked about your North Welsh background. Why didn't you want to work with the Welsh choral tradition?
BH: It's the polyphonic or many-voiced quality of eastern European singing generally that I was drawn to; they pull against each other in permanent tension. The Welsh choir is homophonic; they sing in unison, with one voice, as if they all agree. The experience of being in a choir resembles the eastern European version: it's total mayhem behind the scenes. The eastern European choir resembles a very lively conversation around a dinner table where for the most part we don't agree and when we do, it's by sheer accident.
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This conversation is taken from the publication Singing to the Sea available from Cornerhouse.