Philip Speakman, Algal Shades

28 June - 10 July

Opening: 10 July, 6-9pm.

Philip Speakman is a London based UK artist, graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2017.

Speakman has previously exhibited at Lethaby Gallery, London, and was selected for the OUTPOST Members’ Show 2018, selected by the White Pube.

His upcoming project, The Err, is expected to open at Grizedale Arts, The Lake District, in September 2021.

For the residency at OUTPOST I worked on Algal Shades, a sound installation exploring memory, reification and fictions within the Norfolk landscape. Algal Shades centres around a remixed version of Petrichor Project, an audio piece commissioned for radio by the BBC and Arts Council as part of ‘New Creatives’ earlier this year. The piece was remix specifically for OUTPOST’s residency space with Tom Moore.

In Petrichor Project we travel amongst the phantom pastoral landscape of a future drowned Norfolk. Voices, sounds and memories unmoored in the deluge swirl amongst the tides and shifting silt banks. The natural and the artificial intermingle; facts seem strange, fictions undo history and an unruly nature colonises the mind.

In Algal Shades I intended to create a shelter for travelling in the remixed work. I hoped to introduce another layer of the intimacy in the remix’s presentation, that of my own memories with friends, so as to produce uncanny transferals and slippages between different narrative threads, between the bodily and the imagined, deterritorializing the personal and writing new and unsettling layers onto the palimpsest of the Norfolk landscape.