Muscle Damage was an artwork that I created in collaboration with my father, Gordon Taylor.

I presented the artwork for my MFA degree show (Glasgow School of Art) at The Glue Factory in Glasgow, in June 2017.

Digital damage

Foremost, Muscle Damage is a compilation of digital material including binaural sound and still imagery. The sound features a collaborative voiceover that narratively explores the loss of a local accent when someone moves away from home. It picks up on how an accent is strongly related to the landscape associated with where you grow up.

So, the images that feature in Muscle Damage are of the landscape in The Peak District National Park, in Derbyshire. This is where I grew up and it is also where my father still lives. Well, on the fringes of it anyway. Some of the images are of sculptures that I made in response to the narrative and the landscape. My father and me originally produced the included images as photographic slides. A&M Imaging in Edinburgh then processed and digitized the slides for us.

I designed the artwork as a digital compilation for display on a television monitor with headphones. By accepting it as a digital compilation, not just a film or video, I think it revealed more phenomenological interplay. Specifically, how the senses of sight and sound punctuate one another.

Physical muscle

muscle damage

Muscle Damage also included related objects for the audience to encounter throughout a physical setting. A chosen object hung from girders with bungee cord. I rigged it with a battery powered motor. The motor agitated the sculpture and made it flutter with movement within the space.

Furthermore, I placed other objects within the environment. All of the objects were also featured in photographic form within the digital compilation too.

Muscle Damage
muscle damage
Muscle Damage