Lydia Gluck

“Unseen” was a collaboration with textile artist Lydia Gluck in 2021. You can hear the demos of the pieces created below, performed by singer Rose Szafir.

Lydia created a series of textile works during the pandemic that explore the embodied experience of swimming at night during lockdown. Reflecting her interest in tensions between textures, between solid and unstable ground and between graphic shapes and soft undulating lines, the works include hand-dyed textiles and paintings using natural inks, as well as graphite and charcoal. 

Lydia wrote accompanying poetry for these works and she approached me about setting this text to music. I created a series of rounds for groups of singers inspired by the artworks using Lydia's words, which were performed in the opening of an exhibition of her work.

In Lydia's words: "Swimming at night has offered me something I have not been able to find elsewhere; a remembering of the uninhibited self, alongside a forgetting of the physicality of being seen both by myself and by others". 

I felt that the form of a round/canon would be perfect to reflect night swimming, songs that constantly flow with no clear beginning or end. 

Summer 2021