She Moves Through the Fair (pipe whistle)

Marla Hlady

April 2003

A sound-based sculpture-installation by Toronto artist Maria Hlady takes on an elusive "air." An arrangement of copper pipes, wires and tubes terminating in neatly constructed plywood boxes, sprawls across the floor.
The revealed workings- but concealed acoustics- comprise the literal voice-box for the soundscape She Moves Through the Fair, an English traditional song. The sound is manipulated by passing it down various lengths and diameters of copper pipe that distort and create resonance, eventually finding voice in wall-mounted speakers.

We undergo an acoustical process that we comprehend visually as pipes and boxes, and experience audibly as the muddied sound that we might experience when listening to conversation through the duct-work of a heating system. The arrangement of copper, plywood and cable becomes a sensuous collaboration of form, texture and colour, delicately supported on spindly brass rods that elevate the copper pipes above the floor. We are left suspended in the auditory experience of seductive visual presence.