Marco Gobbi

Vibrant Vessels

(2016)
Vibrant Vessels
AplusB Gallery, Brescia (IT)
Exhibition view

Which form could my own sound of the sea have?
Well, I tried to develope two different forms capable of containing this thought. It’s said that if you put a seashell close to your ear you can hear the sound of the sea from where it comes from. The idea that you can be connected with a sea that is far away is as beautiful as melancholic, like an echo of a past still present.

The first passage (Wake, 2013) of this sound starts from the study of the morphology of the seashell; I imagined that the lines and grooves on the surface  were the recording of the sea imprinted on its form as the grooves on a vinyl record are the music.

For the second passage of this sound (Doppelganger Thresholds, 2016) I was thinking to another theory who explains the seashell sound: shells amplify the flow of the listener’s own blood. The 1993 textbook “Science Interactions” reports: what you are really hearing is the sound of your own blood rushing through the vessels inside your ear. You normally don’t hear this sound. The seashell makes it easier for you to hear it. So echo of past, distance and own blood made me think at the place where I grew up, my grandma’s house. In her garden there is a fence whose pillar has two holes: the first is the original hole of the gate where the deadbolt was meant to be closed, while the other (with the same function) was made later due to the slightly collapsing of the gate. I thought inside of this second hole there was the second passage of this sound. So I made an exact copy of the gate which I completely covered by seashells, and finally I closed with a piece of metal the first hole; while with two fragments of shells I closed the holes of the real gate, so that now there is a single hole of access for both.

The third object of this series (Those of us without a purpose  remain deposited, 2016) is an hourglass containing the dust waste from the first and the second sculptures, an urn containing their remains.