Phil Dadson
“Between Worlds”

Phil Dadson’s work for this edition is in two parts; Between Worlds, a video work made in 2011, and a selection of 10 Sound Stories from a series dating from the mid 1970s to the present.

Dadson fuses the temporal elements of sound and image in Between Worlds to create a specific physicality and pulse unique to his prolific video practice. The triadic (canoe-prow) reference implicit to many of his works inverses the image and creates a 360 dimension, inviting the viewer into an alternate world to experience the rhythm of the work. Between Worlds suggests we are conduits for a world of sounds and images at once real and illusory, and that instead of taking a breath ourselves, we are breathed by nature.

The archive of 10 Sound Stories are personal insights into Dadson’s sonic experience that speak to a wider experience of sound and place. For Dadson, Sound Stories are the “experience of sound over and above any other experience. This focus on sound may occur in terms of either natural or magical occurrences ranging from the breath or voice of the unseen, to awesome sounds experienced in life; or, as stories that feature sound in relation to people, animals or objects endowed with supernatural or seductive powers or simply stories that obtain significance from the world of sound.”

These stories are activated once again by the act of re-telling, acting like an echo that creates and draws from a collective universal experience of sound, highlighting the significance listening has on our lives.