‘Jo’ was a proposal submitted to the Waterford Gallery of Art 'Sound & Portrait Open Call'.
The piece consists of an audio recording of Jo, the daughter and first child of one half of Nocht Studio, Philip and his wife, Eve. A recording device was placed on a small stool in the living room of their home, located in Old Parish, Co. Waterford, to capture the sound of Jo crawling on the flour, specifically the plopping of the palm of her hands on the ground as she moves along on all fours.
The idea for the recording arose at the onset of Jo learning to walk and the realisation that the sound of her crawling about the house would imminently become less frequent and soon disappear from the home. The recording submitted with this proposal was taken on a rainy morning of 30.09.22.
The stool that the recording device was placed on also forms part of the exhibition proposal. An audio exciter was mounted to the underside of a leg of the stool, allowing one to hear the looped recording by placing one’s ear on the top of the stool.
The stool itself was made by the other half of Nocht, Martin, on the day of Jo’s birth and was gifted to her upon their first meeting; it has Jo’s birth date engraved on it, ‘24.10.21’.
