Bill Fontana - White Sound at the Wellcome Collection

Bill Fontana - White Sound at the Wellcome Collection

27 September, 2011
by: Mary Selman

Waves crash over the heads of passers-by on the Euston Road in a disorientating new installation

So. I'm walking up the Euston Road, thoroughly hungover, trying to find the Wellcome Collection. It's a sunny morning, with the exhaust fumes from passing traffic creating a kind of haze; the cars are flowing sometimes freely, sometimes less so. Squinting intently at all the buildings, I take a couple of extra milliseconds to register that it's all suddenly gone rather quiet.  

What the artist responsible, Bill Fontana, calls “probably the best and most sophisticated sound system you can get” is providing a gentle, yet enveloping surround-sound experience, almost completely muting the mechanical growl of the vehicles passing just feet away. I can see them – I can certainly smell them – but they are now distant, somehow unreal.

Commissioned in partnership with the Green Camden Campaign, we're told that Fontana's latest sound installation on the Euston Road – one of the most polluted roads in Europe – is part of an initiative to raise environmental awareness. This is, however, by far the least striking of the impressions one is left with.

For those of you who are familiar with Chesil beach – an 18-mile, virtually straight pebble bank on the Jurassic coast – the visual echo provided by the constant ebb and flow of the traffic along the length of Euston Road is immediately evident. The implied formal symmetry perfectly offsets Fontana's “infinite collisions of unique moments”, configurations of acoustic spectra, pebbles and cars that will rhythmically return and return again, yet never quite in the same way. I would strongly recommend looking at the accompanying footage of Chesil Beach, which plays in the atrium of the building throughout the run of the piece, particularly if you haven't visited this part of Dorset yourself.

The slow time signature provided by salt water from the English Channel filtering into and out of chert and flint pebbles creates an eerily relaxing sensation, considering that one is standing on one of London's busiest, dirtiest and most congested roads. It is this strangely coherent dissonance of moods provided by the tension between what we can see versus what we can hear that is the most disconcerting aspect of White Sound.

Having spoken to Fontana, for whom routine is anathema, I was strongly put in mind of 'mindfulness' – an attentive awareness of reality as it can be perceived moment to moment. Derived from Buddhist teachings, it is now also used to refer to therapeutic psychology practices. Small interruptions to one's quotidian routine render us more aware of our immediate surroundings, liberate us from circular – and potentially destructive – patterns of behaviour, and create a richer sensory impression of our surroundings. And this, for me, is what this installation provides us with: a subtle, improbable liberation from sameness – a reminder that we don't have to resign ourselves to just marking time. Here, on the Euston Road, drenched with spray, we are waving, not drowning.

Bill Fontana - White Sound is at the Wellcome Collection from 22nd September to 16th October 2011.

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Mary Selman