Our Marketing Assistant, Libby Whyte, sat down with co-curators and former Artists in Residence, Kay Aplin and Joseph Young ahead of their exhibition Edges, to discuss the project, their practices and inspiration during their residency at Watts Gallery.

Libby Whyte: Could you each tell me a little bit about your individual practices?

Kay Aplin: I'm a sculptor working in architectural ceramics. I do public art commissions as my money earner and in fact have been doing it for almost 30 years! Next year is my anniversary since graduating from Chelsea in 1995. I’ve been making large-scale tile installations for exhibitions since about 2013. I have a different method for these; whereas I usually press-mould stoneware clay for my public art work, my tile installations are slip-cast porcelain, always wall based, and consist of multiple components. So far, they've been inspired by botanical and natural objects that I observe through a microscope, and I create designs from highly magnified images. They are always site specific, which kind of goes back to being a public artist because I respond to where I am.

In 2011, I started a project called The Ceramic House, which is where we're sitting right now. It's our home, but it's also a pop-up gallery/artist residency project space. I decided to use it as a showcase for my work because I do tile installations, so I started by tiling it. That led into becoming a curator and the projects got more and more ambitious. Then in 2016, we [Kay and Joseph] joined forces and since then, it's been a collaborative curatorial project.

Joseph Young: I have a background in theatre originally, but in the early 2000s I retrained with a visual artist working in sound and performance primarily, but I also do installation, film, print – all kinds of stuff – but at the centre of it is immersive sounds.

I use binaural microphones which you wear in your ears like personal stereo earbuds. They are very high quality, tiny little mics, and what those microphones do is they capture and experience a place. When you listen back, particularly on headphones, you have this sense of being in the sound environment where these microphones were. It's almost like you're inside the head of the recorder.

My work is site-specific as well. I always start by listening to places and then finding ways to record them using these microphones. Walking around, looking at details, the wider environment, and then back in the studio. The kind of creative work happens as I try and make sense of those sounds and find ways of editing them and that will really depend on what the output is.

I also work a lot using geolocation. There's an app that I use called “Echoes”, and that allows the user to walk through public spaces and the sounds are triggered automatically depending on depending on the person's movements. I’ve worked a lot using that kind of technology over the last few years.

It's all about listening to place for me. It's all about trying to uncover the kind of hidden meanings in the soundscape and then connecting that to history.

Kay: I think that it's a nice crossover, because I uncover the hidden details in the natural objects that I've found by looking through the microscope, so we're both uncovering hidden details.

Libby: Yeah, and that works very well. Would you say that the things that inspire each of you to create your works often go hand in hand?

Kay: Not always, but for this project, absolutely. For most of the projects, yeah.

Joseph: We always talk about our work evolving in parallel. We go on a journey together, but side by side. The works don't necessarily intermingle into a single installation or a single object, but they kind of evolve in parallel and in conversation. They're often designed to be exhibited in the same space.

Kay: Which, from a ceramic point of view, it's an unusual offer to have the sound element there as well, because normally you go to a ceramic show and it there's no sound. When we're doing an installation, you get a much fuller, multisensory experience.

Libby: I think sound can be such a powerful tool. I've gone to a few exhibitions where they’ve used sound, and it can really transform your experience.

Libby: Tell me a bit more about The Ceramic House. I did read a little bit into the project, and it really interested me – it’s your home, but it’s also your studio space?

Kay: Not quite – we both have studios in a separate location in Brighton called Phoenix Artspace. It's the biggest art studio provider in in the south coast, and it's great to be there because we've got a big community of artists around us and I’ve got the space to have several rooms and quite a few kilns. When we host residencies, we offer that studio space to any artist to come and work there.

The Ceramic House is essentially an artist home, but it's a rather extraordinary one because it's got these tile installations everywhere. In 2011, I started opening the house as part of the Artists Open Houses Festival, so that's been the kind of lynchpin of The Ceramic House exhibition programme. During the month of May most years, we open the house and curate international shows here. We've got a little gallery space – we converted the garage into a tiny white cube, so that's ideal for things like installation work. The rest of the time we do accommodation here. It's an extraordinary place to stay, and it's got a bit of a reputation now around Brighton. I meet people all the time and they say “Oh, I've been to your house”.

To go with the Edges project, the last exhibition we had here was Irish ceramics, and the previous one was the Estonian ceramics.

Libby: Speaking of Edges, can you tell me a little bit about the project?

Joseph: The Edges project is across three nations and across the two disciplines, and we're at the centre of it. What we're essentially doing is offering out the possibility to collaborate between those two disciplines, and between those three countries, so we're kind of bringing people together.

Kay: But specifically, we're offering the opportunity to work for the ceramic artists to work with the sound artists in quite an intimate way, which none of them have ever done before. It's a very unusual specific combination of ceramics and sound, so people are interested in getting involved because it’s a new thing for them.

It's up to them how they collaborate, sometimes they really gel. It's been fascinating to watch that, and they're just absolutely on the same wavelength. Other times, they very much work in parallel like we do, where they’re both responding to the same theme but not interacting as much.

Libby: And how many artists are involved in the project?

Kay: There are two duos that did the residency at The Ceramic House, who are both Irish sound artists collaborating with Estonian ceramic artists. Then there's a third pair who we are commissioning to make a piece of work for the exhibitions. This time, it's an Estonian sound artist working with an Irish ceramic artist, so we're trying to mix up the nations as well as the disciplines.

Joseph: The third pair are providing us with pre-existing pieces of work, but we're pairing them together and seeing how we can make them interact in the space.

Kay: They have been part of the project since the beginning. The project started in April 2022, but we’ve been working on it for about four years.

Joseph: We’re also working with a curator in Ireland called Richard Carr, who I met through doing a practise-based PhD in Ireland. He does a lot of work in sound art, so we've been working together.

Libby: That sounds exciting! Has there been anything in particular that inspired you during your residency at Watts Gallery?

Kay: I respond to where I am, so for this particular project, it's been a bit tricky to respond to sites because the works we’ve produced have been a result of an artist residency in Ireland with an organisation called Interface, and then the residency at Watts.

At Watts, I started off with the Chapel, because I do tiles and it's absolutely my thing. I've moved away from that which, in a way, I'm slightly sad about, but it was almost too obvious for me. I think I would have needed a lot more time to come up with a way to respond to the Chapel because my work can be quite similar. So, I did the Chapel in a different way. I really got quite engrossed in the gravestones and the way moss is growing over them. A lot of the headstones there are made of terracotta. They were probably made in the pottery [Compton Pottery] and many have these stunning designs in relief.

Some of them have been there for 100 years or so. You can't even see what they are anymore because they're completely covered with moss or lichen, but you can still detect shapes and designs underneath. I was really fascinated with this. I realised that moss was one of the things I was fascinated by in Connemara, so I thought that's what I'm going to concentrate on because that responds to both sides.

At Interface, I discovered a beach where all the grains of sand are entire microscopic organisms. I really couldn’t wait to see if this was true, and I managed to get my hands on a very powerful microscope which I got on loan from St Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, and then I managed to get an attachment so I could take photographs through it. I did indeed find incredible creatures in every grain of sand, and as well as looking at those I went and collected whatever other natural materials I could find. It's absolutely amazing what you see through it – it really is undetectable to the human eye.

So, I've been looking at moss and lichen through the microscope and then marrying that with the geology of each place. I brought the things I collected from Connemara to Watts, so during the residency I spent a lot of time capturing images through the microscope.

Joseph: Because this project has so many different strands and involves different countries, I'm trying to bring the sounds of those places, both of Ireland and Estonia, to Watts in order to kind of link this whole project together, alongside some recollections of the history of the Watts Artists' Village itself. My PhD in Ireland was at a historic house in the Republic, working with an aristocratic family and their family archives, which stretched back over 400 years, but these archives are not part of a public collection. I created a 90-minute sound trail called The Ancestors which was in the grounds of their estate. As you walk through the formal gardens, you encounter the ghosts of the archive, as it were. That was very fresh in my mind, so initially, I was interested in the archives that you had here. I talked to staff and people that have been on the estate for a while who had memories about those kinds of things. And then interestingly, I also got interested in the graveyard because the grave of Aldous Huxley is there, who wrote The Doors of Perception. For me, the 'doors of perception', if you like, were opened by the Chapel. It's an extraordinary rendition of the heavenly realm, with the angels and the biblical quotations, the colour and the Celtic symbols. That set me thinking about the soundscape that I wanted to create in that space to open up those doors of perception through sound. Those were the two things that I'm trying to weave into the work that I'll be creating for the sound trail.

All images courtesy of Kay Aplin and Joseph Young.