Isabel Coulier (she/her/they)
My work interweaves connections between humans, nature, community, spirituality and healing. With a love ethos rooted in communal healing, I create and facilitate spaces through sculpture, installation and performance to allow people to explore their creative expression, experience human and spiritual connection and altered states of consciousness. My intention is to build bridges between people and the living beings on earth- art is crucial for everyone in a time in which pain and suffering are ever present, it provides a connection to our fundamental human essence. My art work is also my personal healing and spiritual journey, a reciprocal cycle of connecting with myself, humans and the land.
THE RESONATION CHAMBER
Multi-media, interactive sculpture and sound installation, Mild steel, 200cm x 120cm.
Live mic-reverb-speaker system.
The public is invited into the Resonation Chamber to experience resonant overtones as they sing. The sensory deprivation of the darkness heightens the ethereal sound experience and can stimulate altered states of consciousness, accessed through the gatekeepers of the senses.
This space can also instigate play through our inner child, encouraging expression and experimentation with your voice. I want to allow people to shed their self-consciousness around singing and making noise.
The dark space invites internal reflection, a re-entering into the womb. It can be used as a place for meditation and stillness, with primal echoes of caves and churches.
THE FREE SOUND CHOIR
Sound Installation, 4 x DVD players and speakers.
Recorded voices chanting and breathing play quietly from speakers in each corner of the room surrounding the central chamber, creating a full room experience, a circumambulation around the centre. The space reflects the sacred geometry of a circle in the centre of a square, the four corners representing balance, the four seasons, the four elements, the four directions. The centre symbolises the cycle of life and death, the Self, the divine, the essence.
The sound recordings are from a performance I facilitated in the Reid Gallery, the Free Sound Choir. A group of us improvised singing in the resonant room. We first lay down, breathed through our bellies and exhaled aaaaa in time with our breath. This is the part of the recording played in the installation. The singing gives a subtle prompt to the audience interacting with the chamber, to sing. The recording picked up resonance created in the room, an angelic high-pitched hum.
The same sound piece is played from all 4 DVD players, beginning together at the beginning of the day. Over the day the singing naturally comes out of sync due to the nature of the technology, in the same way that our voices sang out of sync due to our breath.
