Infrastructure engages with sound’s unseen forces

Tony Nicholls' Infrastructure engages with sound’s unseen forces

4 October 2011

Tony Nicholls' Infrastructure engages with sound’s unseen forces

Hamilton artist Tony Nicholls’ installation Infrastructure opens at Aratoi this weekend. It investigates a pervasive phenomenon in all our lives: audible and inaudible sound.

“The viewer will enter a space filled with varying sound both audible and inaudible, see the results of energy transfer and a visualisation of wave forms,” says Tony. “They may feel somewhat diminished by the scale of the towers and string that will be barely contained within the gallery.”

His installation features two large 2.5m high steel hammerhead towers (pylons) connected by strings, and other mechanisms made from Wood, brass and carbon fibre. One end of the towers is connected via string to a pool of water held in a large satellite dish, in which wave patterns will appear.

Tony studied sculpture at Otago Polytechnic School Of Art in the early eighties and made steel sculptures and acoustic guitars after graduating. “I became interested in sound when I worked towards my Honour’s Degree at Wintec I continued the project completing a Master’s degree also at Wintec two years ago.”
Originally from New Plymouth, he now lives in Hamilton and works in the Painting/Sculpture department of Wintec.

“Infrastructure can be seen as a system revealing the propagation and consequent effect of waves on and through materials,” he says. “In telecommunications, waves are controlled and put to work with transmission frequencies operating beyond the normal human range of perception. Here also unseen forces are brought out of concealment becoming either visible or audible by electromechanical systems.”

Tony has shown his work in Hamilton, Wellington and New Plymouth. His work was paired with that of pioneering kinetic artist Len Lye (1901-1980) in Len Lye and Tony Nicholls: Double harmonic at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2006. He won first prize at the inaugural Kinetika, a festival celebrating kinetic art, in New Plymouth earlier this year.

ENDS.

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