Kate Carr

 

Kate Carr’s work for Coventry Biennial uses sound to trace the trajectory of Coventry’s River Sherbourne from source to its joining with the River Sowe.

The work charts Kate’s discovery of the river, her attempts to find it in various locations, and efforts to walk its course through the city of Coventry and beyond. The River Sherbourne is not only small, but in some places very difficult to find. It winds behind factories, moves underground at Coventry, before emerging again as a narrow and illusive drain. In many places it is totally inaccessible due to roads, buildings or other forms of private property.

Kate spent several weeks walking the course of the River, recording it as it traversed schools, fields, factories and roads. In doing so she often thought of the contrast between her own experience and Annea Lockwood’s renowned sonic works tracing rivers, in which they emerge with a certain majesty, highly present and active in the soundscape.

“The work turns to sound to chart an overlooked and almost absent river, indeed one entirely absent in the sections where it has been relocated underground. Even when above ground the Sherbourne is quiet, at times undetectable within the soundscape. It is in many ways a river struggling to be heard. In some sections it exists as a highly polluted, slow running drain, at other points a delicately tinkling waterway replete with birds and insects, while in Coventry itself it is absent and underground. In the work the river emerges in the soundscape only sporadically, its influence, at times, might be heard in bird calls and insects, while at others it is drowned out completely by the human-built environment. It is my hope that its regular silence and absences in this work sparks a consideration of the many ways we have profoundly reshaped our world, and how we might do this in a manner more considerate of landscape and other species.”

During Coventry Biennial 2021, Kate’s work is being exhibited at Coventry Cathedral.

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