Imagine A World Without Birdsong
Mark Edwards and Stuart Bowditch began working collaboratively in 2018 exploring their shared interest in encountering beauty in the unremarkable whilst exploring the contemporary landscape of East Anglia. Each new piece is a still picture with an audio recording coinciding exactly with the length of time the film is exposed, ranging from two – fifteen minutes, and made together at the same location at the same time. This duration of time is part of the experience of the landscape when making a work and whilst the pictures' sound is normally absent, and the recording devoid of image, these new pieces merge both processes together forming a new experience of the landscape. The resulting works aren’t stills but images that show movement and a passing of time, breaths of wind, birds passing through the frame, recorded as ghosts by the long exposure and present in the sound recording through their birdsong, alongside passing cars, distant conversations, aircraft, muffled music and a host of ambient sounds. A single moment and place in time, shared.