Hannah Sawtell

Hannah Sawtell
RE PETITIONER IN ZERO TIME (drone detail 1), 2013

Art at Reading’s Hannah Sawtell exhibition at Vilma Gold, London
16 October – 17 November 2013

For ‘RE PETITIONER IN ZERO TIME’ the viewer is posited between bespoke transmitters and a video screen, which also functions acoustically. Sawtell makes industrially produced locally made objects that are designed after a period of working with the manufacturer. The digital sound, made by Sawtell with handheld devices, rebounds toward the viewer via the acoustic screen engendering an aural image and creating a rhythmic spatial environment with a density of social-noise, what Sawtell describes as “Global Grey Viral”.
The video employs an aesthetic influenced by record covers, war games and ‘Fly like a bird’, a game that takes a bird’s eye view of an all but abandoned scenario. Sawtell’s video uses a computer generated single shot, which is then conjoined with a video of architectural images edited by accessible social media tools.

Sawtell harnesses and utilises moving imagery with a rhythmic looped materiality and a repetitive deceleration, a concrete statement of dialectical noise. Her videos and installations make recordings of the labour held within objects so that the digital and the material transmit together.

The Daily Worker Offices and Printing Press in Clerkenwell was designed by Erno Goldfinger in 1946. In the 1980’s the newspaper, by then called the Morning Star, sold the building and moved to Old Street. Consequently developers demolished William Rust House in 1988. For this show Sawtell rebuilds Goldfinger’s home for the Socialist daily paper. Using the original architectural drawings, she moulds contemporary virtual space.

All facets of ‘RE PETITIONER IN ZERO TIME’ have been made during Sawtell’s ongoing work with animators, industrial manufacturers, musicians, designers and writers. This exhibition balances research, the object and space as proposition, digital sound-work and autobiography.
Sawtell will also publish Broadsheet Number 4, ‘RE PETITIONER’. Her Broadsheet series is a free itinerant print project.
Broadsheet Number 4 is printed by the Mirror Trinity via and co-designed by Michal Boncza. Boncza is a former member of the editorial board of Artery Magazine. His design work includes posters for Latin America solidarity, global union federations and he currently works for the Morning Star daily newspaper.

Broadsheet Number 4, ‘RE PETITIONER’, consists of texts written by various artists and writers. All of these co-workers have shaped the outcome of this publication.