Leviathan Whispers & Landscape

“ There's a world going on underground ”

Leviathan Whispers explore the relationships between sound and landscape, and listening as a creative act. Our key image is the Leviathan Horn, a double image of:

•  sounding out, reverberating out through the landscape

•  listening to the earth

These core activities contain ideas of resonance and amplification, of the sense of a landscape of sound, of caves and underground chambers, of seashells, and of the conch, natural trumpet and ear trumpet for the sea.

We use the term landscape rather than the ‘land', the ‘earth' or the ‘environment' because creating landscape is a two way process, giving meaning to and gaining meaning from the natural world. Simon Scharma's book ‘Landscape and Memory' is an excellent introduction to the ways we understand and invest meaning in forest, mountains, seas and caves.

Our sense of landscape is then physical, geological, mythic and historical. The title ‘Leviathan Whispers' carries the sense of a giants whisper and we have this sense of listening to the earth and its history, and of the earth as a physical and mythic space. The geologies of landscape have a poetry, chalk and Flint, Oolitic Limestone, granite and quartz. This sense of landscape is both external and internal, a sense that humans have their own internal landscape and geologies, and that we now have digital as well as physical and mythic landscapes. Landscape is as much an imaginative as a physical space.

The English sense of landscape is shaped by a variety of beliefs. Fairy mounds, sacred springs and rivers, underground chambers and secret passages, all these imply a sense of worlds lying beneath the surface of ours. The mythic geography of Israel and Palestine overlays the landscape of Albion. The Aramathea of the Joseph who brought the young Jesus to our green and pleasant land is the modern Ramalla.

Paths to and from the otherworld criss cross our landscape. There is the folk tale of a Wallingford man travelling east along the Icknield Way. The reek of sulphur grows stronger and stronger and he runs back fleeing form the gates of Hell. Stories of abduction abound through the myths of Persephone, welsh myth and fairy kidnapping. Mow the abductions are by UFO, whose base lies deep beneath the earth entered by polar portals. Underground civilisations possibly malign, possibly benign, always superior.

Devils, black dogs and the ghosts of the executed linger at cross roads. ‘Corpse paths' cross much of our landscapes. Ley lines carry energy, the souls of the dead seemingly as efficiently as their physical counterparts, energy pylons and telephone poles.

Our landscape is riddled with paths ands labyrinths, portals and doorways; maybe dead ends, maybe leading deeper into ourselves.

Tim Hill