Madeleine COCOLAS
“Spectral”

From Madeleine Cocolas

Spectral is built on a foundation of sounds I collected from my immediate surroundings in recent times. It’s a familiar story, casting your ears close to home. I captured these sounds as a type of aural diary to mark days and weeks as they passed. As our physical worlds seemed to become smaller, my senses of observation and perception of my immediate surroundings sharpened. Inside these small spaces I found a wellspring of materials that seemed to offer themselves up.

At the time I didn’t know why I was collecting sounds or what I would do with them, it just felt like something I needed to do and it helped me stay connected and feel tethered to my surroundings. With my phone on hand, ready to record on walks around the block, past whirring industrial machines, deafening crickets and crashing storms, I found so much beauty and meaning in the sounds and the recordings I collected.

As the collection grew, I could sense these links between them, some sounds seemed to gravitate towards one another, they self arranged almost. It felt very natural to then build layers over the top of them, to be able to express some of the emotions that the sounds triggered, of memories from the moments from when they were captured.

At its core, Spectral is about deep stillness, observation and perception underpinned by emotional expression. It is a subtle shift in memory, a recolouring of the world we think we know and a willingness to lean into that possibility.