DD Day 2023 – 4 new artist commissions producing 2 new audio visual works
We are excited to be able to offer 4 artists commissions this year as part of our Delia Derbyshire Day 2023 ‘Doctor Who 60th anniversary heritage project’. Supported by National Lottery Heritage Fund, we are grateful to be able to offer these opportunities to underrepresented North West England based artists who have not had much involvement with heritage before. Artists responded to the theme of Doctor Who as well as Delia’s work and the Delia Derbyshire archive based at John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.
These will be 2 x new music/sound and visual based art commissions to be presented online on DD Day 2023 – 23 November – both online (from 9am) and in-person as part of our event at Central Library, Manchester (more info on events page).
Follow us on our social media channels or join our mailing list as we countdown to DD Day 2021’s new collaborative art presentations on 23 November!
DD Day 2023 artists share their process and inspiration
DD Day 2023 audio-visual commission 1: Joy Ingle (sound) and Laura Sparks (visual)
Visiting the Delia Derbyshire archive at the John Rylands Library has been integral to our work and I’ve found that it’s given me a real sense of Delia’s compositional process and creative outlook. So many of her rough sketches and plans marry the intensely mathematical with romantic. One such sketch was a set of presets for an EMS VCS3 synthesiser, that I was actually able to bring to life using a VCS3 which I had access to. Working with Laura has been a fantastic experience. We share a love of folklore and mythology which bleeds into our creative practices and has really aesthetically influenced our approach to world-building on this project.
“This project has definitely pushed me and helped me to develop into a better artist and collaborator. I can’t wait to share what we’ve made!”
When first confronted with the archive catalogue, its hard to know where to start, you want to look at it all! We decided to initially look at anything that might relate to landscapes, nature and world building. Throughout all the notes we looked at we were really struck by descriptions of the worlds and atmospheres Delia wanted to achieve – they were often seemingly conflicting descriptors such as ‘romantic but poisonous’, ‘gentle but metallic’, ‘electric and natural’. I feel this showed she had such a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve, and that it was probably like nothing she’d ever heard before. It was encouraging to make these discoveries together with Joy, often getting excited about the same things, which really helped us on our way to deciding what kind of piece to make together.
“Inspired by our findings we wanted to create a world that had some opposition and contradiction within it – mixing natural and electronic materials, samples and techniques.“
DD Day 2023 audio-visual commission 2: Joel Foster (music) & Alexis Maxwell (visual)
Produced in partnership with Brighter Sound
We have a shared vision for the work which we came to really quickly after visiting the archive. One thing that really stuck with me is that throughout Delia’s notes and drawings, there were lots of stars. I don’t know if it was a conscious thing or it represented something musical that she used in the graphic scores. So I’ve tried to incorporate that into the music too. I was touched buy things like the fact that she was a working class woman and she’s from the Midlands but she had to kind of adopt a received pronunciation voice to get along in the BBC. So you can see parallels there between filtering or distorting herself in ways she would do with sound in her career.
“Exploring the archives eliminated any kind of facade. Things were written on back of tennis flyers and old memos. That was a revelation in some ways.”
I’m using animation to create a sci-fi short that draws a lot from what we saw in Delia’s notes in the archive, a lot from classic sci-fi imagery, and the whole Doctor Who aesthetic. Delia used a lot of graphic scores, these visual representations of music using symbols and they became a point of inspiration for me when creating visuals and trying to craft worlds out of them. Something that really struck me was how reading someone’s writing and looking at their doodles humanises them. It makes the work feel alive in such a different way than I’m used to.
“I believe that all artists leave traces of themselves in the things they create. So we figured out what traces of Delia we heard and saw – humanity, loops, repetition, traces of loss, isolation and resilience – and responded to them.“
The new art will be published online on Delia Derbyshire Day, 23 November
with an in-person premiere at
Manchester Central Library on 23 November too – check event page for info
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT OUR DD DAY 2023 COMMISSIONED ARTISTS
