Ricocheting quietly between photographic
landscapes, drawn abstractions and poetic recollections, this artist's book assumes the form of a deferred performance. Serving as a kind of response to the French artist and experimental musician's recent sonic and visual output, the book comprises a series of film stills shot during her travels to New Mexico and Arizona, overlaid with a collection of at once crude and delicate
drawings made in Australia.
Co-published by Shelter Press and Perimeter Editions to coincide with Atkinson's Australian tour,
Ambient Park echoes of Brian Eno's
On Land or
The Plateaux of Mirror (with
Harold Budd) as astutely as it offers a nod to the untethered line work and colour of Clifford Still, Helen Frankenthaler,
Amy Sillman or
John Baldessari.
Working to navigate a path across real lands, negative spaces and psychic topographies,
Ambient Park manifests in the filmic trace, the words that spring to mind and the lines the body can draw.
Experimental musician, sound and visual artist Félicia Atkinson (born 1981) lives on the wild coast of Normandy (France). She has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on
Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson.
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don't speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character's tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist.
Félicia Atkinson has collaborated with musicians including
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Chris Watson, Christina Vantzou, and
Stephen O'Malley, and with ensembles including Eklekto (Geneva) and Neon (Oslo). She has performed at venues and festivals including INA GRM/Maison de la Radio and the Philharmonie (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), the Barbican Center (London), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Atonal (Berlin), Henie Onstad (Oslo), Unsound (Krakow), and Skanu Mesz (Riga). Her work has been commissioned by filmmakers (
Ben Rivers, Chivas de Vinck) and fashion houses (Prada, Burberry). She has exhibited in museums, galleries, and biennials including RIBOCA Biennale (Riga), Overgaden (Copenhagen), BOZAR (Brussels), Espace Paul Ricard (Paris), and MUCA ROMA (Mexico City).
