Bethel’s Regier Art Gallery has a rare exhibit opportunity – an installation that relies on sound along with imagery. “Forest Listening” by Liz K. Miller is an audio-visual installation that considers how listening to sylvan sounds can reconnect humans to forests, and how the combination of audio and visual can enhance that connection.
The exhibition in the gallery inside Luyken Fine Arts Center on campus will run through Feb. 9 (note the earlier closing date than listed on posters). There will not be a public reception, but regular gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 2-4 p.m. There is no admission charge.
Miller is a British interdisciplinary artist and researcher who “works at the intersection of sound and imagery, exploring the listening experience through visual diagramming, scoring and drawing.”
“I met Liz and experienced some of her work last year when she exhibited at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecologies conference in Florida,” said Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel professor of visual arts and design and Regier Gallery coordinator. “She’ll be a virtual visiting artist in my Slow Art for Fast Times class later this month.”
Miller’s techniques include printmaking, pigment-making, cyanotype, field recording and audio analysis, which combine to create installations, works-on-paper, podcasts and performances.
The audio recording used in “Forest Listening” comes from the sound of rain crashing into dry ground in the Forest of Mar, Scotland, during the summer heat wave of 2018.
Miller buried hydrophones beneath the earth’s surface, changing the audio perspective of rain hitting from above to “the below-ground nonhuman position,” she says in her artist statement.
“I analyzed the rainstorm field recording using a digital rendering called a spectrogram, in which time runs along the horizontal axis and frequency up the vertical axis.
“I re-worked the visual format of the soundscape by combining the spectrogram with hand-drawn patterns echoing rain on a windowpane to give the image visual reference.
“I made four diagrams to represent four different decibel ranges: the darkest image depicts the loudest raindrops, through to the lightest which represents the faintest droplets. This diagramming technique is a visual exploration of sound, intended to spark alternative perspectives of underheard sonic elements within soundscapes.”
For the installation “Forest Listening,” she re-made the four diagrams as outdoor canvas banners, each of which shows a section of the original diagrams and is enlarged to human height to surround the listener, echoing the perspective of the field recording from below the ground.
The audio-visual nature of the installation expands the listening experience, extending the act of listening beyond the auditory and into the multi-modal.
Miller recently completed her Ph.D. at the Royal College of Art in London. Her practice-based research considers how listening to the sounds trees make can reconnect people to woodlands, and how the combination of audio and visual can be used to enhance that connection.
In 2023, Miller exhibited at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., Copeland Gallery and Beaconsfield Gallery in London, and WIA Gallery in Lewes, U.K
Recent artwork presentations include “Listening with Diagrams” at the Beyond Listening conference in Budapest in 2023, and “Sylvan Sounds” at the Beyond Human Communication symposium in London in 2022.
Her artwork “Sound Sketch – Forest Rain” was used in the workshop “Ways of Listening to Forests” at the Centre for Art & Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2021.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel ranks at #23 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “Best Regional Colleges Midwest” for 2023-24. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see http://www.bethelks.edu
