Silence, Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail : 1999
This is an early site-specific work, created for Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail in 1999. The word Silence is silvered onto 7 sheets of glass that are mounted vertically in a mill pond. The text on the glass is written in reverse, so that the word can only be read the right way around in the reflection on the surface of the mill pond. The idea is that one can only read the word when the surface of the water is still, yet the water is constantly moving, therefore never completely still, drawing a parallel to the fact that we can never experience complete Silence because there are always sounds to be heard. When John Cage went into an anechoic chamber, he did not experience silence, because he could hear the sound of his heart beating, and the electrical squeal of his central nervous system. Another aspect of this work is that that is it always changing by reflecting different parts of the surrounding area, sometimes blending into the background, almost disappearing – echoing the quote from Heraclitus that one can never step into the same river twice because water is always flowing.