* Special embossed, die-cut sleeve with 56-page booklet - 200 copies on black vinyl * Aude Van Wyller (aka Oï les Ox, aka AI les Axes) joins forces with acclaimed poet Lucy Van, author of The Open (2021) and Australian Women's Historical Photography (2024). This debut collaboration weaves together Van Wyller's ambient mutations with Van's incisive, luminous words.
In Material, words reach for the image, sounds reach for the word, and one thing becomes another. The result is an intimate, tactile dialogue between artists and artforms, exploring London itself as a city in constant flux. This three-way collaboration between Aude Van Wyller, Lucy Van, and photographer Christine illuminates the endless mutability of human relationships.
Accents of Hilda Doolittle and Barbara Guest find felicitous fellow travellers in other loosely referenced artists, such as Richard Tuttle, June Felter, and Ouyang Yu's notion of the life cycle of a poem. Since Crooner qui coule sous les clous (2020), Van Wyller has been exploring the resonance of sound in space. Of this collaboration she says: "Keywords written and pronounced by Lucy triggered themes to explore for me: auditory device, anaphora, stance, and this sentence: in the next room, someone is calling. How to picture someone's listening in a sound piece? This woman's voice coming from outside, the other."
This publication could also be taken as an audiobook. As the composition responds to Christine's photographs, we imagine a reader looking at the images of the city while reading the text, recomposing the sound, anchoring, layering the soundtrack.
The booklet and record sleeve are interactive materials. Pictures become inserts which the reader is free to place together or apart, inviting users to engage with photography in endlessly changeable arrangements. The sleeve features integrated postcards interchangeable with the booklet inserts. We invite the reader to collaborate by rearranging and responding, creating a personal, improvisatory, revelatory narrative which can evolve fluidly with each encounter.
