“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we quiver before it” - Donna Tart, The Secret History

There is something enticing about the darkness, about being awake when others are sleeping. Surrounded by people, their illuminated windows a distant testament to life, and I stand on the threshold of existence, invisible to those within.

I exist within a paradox of loving and hating the darkness, for me it holds peace, a city sleeping, the distant hum of traffic, the song of the cicadas drifting in the breeze, the sound of the wind rustling the trees - it’s something that resembles silence, a silence that cannot truly exist. But although those sounds entice me, they draw me in, they also elicit a deep sense of fear within me. Is that the sound of someone breathing, are those footsteps coming towards me, am I truly alone or is somebody watching me? I’ve always feared the dark, or more what lurks within it, but can you deeply fear and love something simultaneously? As a child it was the monsters under my bed I feared, the toys in the corner of my room morphing into faces staring at me as I tried to find a sleep that would never come. An insomniac. I fear sleep, I delay and evade it. I never know which version of myself tomorrow will bring. And moreover I fear the world that happens around me when I am forced to shut my eyes and relinquish my control over it.

Unheard Symphony combines a ceramic sculpture with stitched paper characters alongside a sound composition. The composition was created from a series of overnight field recordings, each spanning six to seven hours of sleep. Initially, the act of recording while asleep unsettled me deeply; I hesitated to listen to the recordings, fearing what revelations might deepen my anxieties about the night. Yet, the experience of eventually listening back to what I had missed was both eerie and strangely captivating. The sculpture and its accompanying sound piece capture my dual feelings of isolation amidst others. They reflect my profound unease with being surrounded yet feeling distanced from those around me. Furthermore, these artworks resonate with the universal human experience of relinquishing control over our environment as we rest, unsure of what silently unfolds in the darkness.