Jura Skye: Between Form, Sound and Feeling
My first introduction to Jura Skye was at Emanuel von Baeyer Gallery, for a one-night event titled Synesthesia. As the name suggests, guests were treated to an experience that sat somewhere between art and music, prompting us all to question the very boundaries between them. At the heart of the exhibition was Ræu, one of Skye’s alluring tapestries. Throughout the evening, Skye and his collaborators proceeded to reverse engineer artworks from the gallery’s exhibition, Walter Sickert and His Circle, into sound. I would be hard-pressed to define the night as a concert, an exhibition, or even a performance. It was certainly a powerful experience, and one that fuelled my curiosity about Skye’s multi-faceted practice.
Image courtesy of Jura Skye.
Bringing material life to sound is an ongoing passion for Skye, whose debut album Nothing exists across both genres. Each song has been painstakingly rendered by the artist as a tapestry through the use of spectrogram technology. Skye uses spectrograms to map frequencies over a period of time, analysing his own compositions and resulting in a visual record that is at once abstracted yet fundamental to the original sound. Originality is a word that strikes a deep chord when considering Skye’s practice, which draws on diverse cultural influences and a diverse background of his own.
Born in Moscow, Skye trained in the modern-classical division of the celebrated Moscow Conservatory. There, he became frustrated by the scientific approach to music which was prevalent, in which the technical was prioritised over and at the expense of emotional resonance. This led Skye to forge his own path, a path unexpectedly enlightened by the guidance of Russian anthropologist Konstantin Kuksin. Through anthropology, and in particular investigating nomadic cultures and their relationships to sound, he was able to reconnect with the emotional potency of music. He also developed a new appreciation for its cultural rootedness, observing how instruments were crafted from the land and formed a much larger part of everyday life than he was used to. In addition to its entertainment value, music was one of several key ways in which these societies preserved and retold their heritage. In this way, Skye came to realise, textiles such as rugs and carpets played a similar role. It was in this unlikely observation that the seeds of Nothing were born.
The 11 tapestries in Jura Skye’s Nothing. Image courtesy of Jura Skye.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Skye found so much inspiration in this nomadic research, as he himself experienced a significant upheaval in 2022 when he left home with his family and moved to London. Upon listening to Nothing, I sense hints of transience and nostalgia, alongside an underlying embrace of experimentation and the unknown. There are moments which feel discordant and even jarring, but those ruptures enable new patterns of sound to emerge. These patterns are then made visible, quite literally, by the accompanying tapestries. The very act of mapping introduces new and nuanced spatial dimensions to the project, simultaneously offering a visual interpretation of the tracks, while feeding back into the listener’s experience of the original sounds.
In London, often cited as the most multicultural city in the world, nothing makes sense. So many of us carry personal and familial stories of migration, and so many of us are craving connection and creative inspiration. It is no wonder that Synesthesia found an enraptured audience here, nor that Skye has connected with so many local collaborators to explore ideas of place and belonging. A sneak preview of the artist’s next project, Return to Trees, feels like a natural yet innovative extension of his practice. Through the use of geophones, Skye has been able to capture subterranean recordings of trees which are then integrated with real human voices in a truly special exploration of the sonic connection between us and the landscape. I can’t help but conclude: we need artists like Skye to reveal and restore these points of connection, while we still can.
Words by Sofia Carreira-Wham
