untitled (mobile piece) baby monitor pairs (x3), radio, fm transmitter, amplification, text, 2016

 

My parents sang me Ella Fitzegerald in order to get me to sleep. Her song ‘paper moon’ is tied to a vivid memory i have of my infant self being laid to rest when i wanted nothing more than to play outside.

In ‘Untitled (mobile)’ my past relationship to sleep is coupled with my present one; blighted by periods of insomnia, periods where one wants nothing more than to sleep but can’t.

Vicious cycles of thought evolve out of hypothetical anxiety: “i become anxious at the prospect of becoming too anxious to sleep” which then, in a paradoxical/self-generative fashion actualises itself in physical symptoms.

The song is broadcast via a transmitter and played through a radio which sits amidst a hanging mobile of baby monitors; suspended and slowly pirouetting around their axis, indeterminately disrupting the transmission and forming feedback loops when a corresponding microphone/transmitter pair are in close proximity. The result is an anxious experience resting (or not) somewhere between nightmare and nostalgia.