Olivia Louvel is a French-born British artist, composer and researcher whose work draws on voice, computer music and digital narrative. Her work is presented in the form of sound recordings, live performance, sound art installations and video art. Her practice is built upon a long-standing exploration of the voice, sung, or spoken, and its manipulation through digital technology as a compositional method. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, investigating the interplay of voice and sculpture, across the Sound Art and Fine Art departments.
In 2020, she resounded an archival tape by British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, applying principles of sculpture to Hepworth’s voice to manipulate its texture, as direct carving, thus exposing the vocal material itself, resulting often in the abstract. The Sculptor Speaks was premiered on Resonance Extra as a stereo version and followed by an audiovisual installation presented at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2021 for Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life. The Sculptor Speaks was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in the Sound Art category at the Ivors Composer Awards 2020.
During her residency, Olivia will explore Lukas Kühne’s sculpture Tvísöngur, how the voice operates as a tool of perception and experience of the inside of sculpture and how the voice activates sculpture. Very often sculpture is looked at as a three-dimensional shape we can circle; but rarely are we invited to enter. What is at play here with Tvísöngur is the corporeality of sculpture, how our bodies as experiencers interact with the sculpture for a whole sensorium experience from within, from the inside of sculpture.
Olivia’s residency is funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.
