Olivia Louvel: Hepworth Resounds

The sixth of YSWN’s online seminar series Level Up in Audio featuring artists and audio professionals sharing their practice and insight.

Sound artist and composer Olivia Louvel talks about her work, which combines voice, electronic music and multimedia with compelling narratives drawn from archives, texts and other documents. In particular she’ll be revealing the inspirations and technology behind her most recent project, 2020’s [Hepworth Resounds], which explored the life and creative work of Wakefield-born 20th-century sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

The seminar is the sixth of 12 online events featuring musical artists and audio professionals running throughout 2021 as part of Level Up In Audio. This YSWN project aims to inspire, grow and sustain the skills and creative opportunities of women and people of minority genders who have an interest in music and technology and whose work and professional development have been curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The seminar will take place via Zoom; attendees will receive a private link through the email used for booking in advance of the event. Tickets are free and space is limited. Book through Eventbrite here: https://buff.ly/3yaNfrJ

Olivia will speak for around 60 minutes, with around 30 minutes open for audience questions and discussion.

As part of YSWN’s Level Up in Audio project this seminar series is intended for an audience of women and people of minority genders – we ask that you respect this when booking tickets and do not deny someone else a place if you are not among this group. We plan to record the seminar for sharing online with a wider audience at a later date.

YSWN's Level Up in Audio project is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

About Olivia Louvel

Olivia Louvel is a French-born British composer and artist whose work draws on voice, computer music and digital narrative. She operates at the intersection of creation and documentation, often taking for a point of departure, texts, poetry, archival and autobiographical documents. 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.

Her largest project to date, [Hepworth Resounds] (2020), is a multipartite sound art project based on British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The Sculptor Speaks is a resounding of a 1961 tape by Barbara Hepworth, premiered on Resonance Extra, and followed by an audiovisual iteration. The Sculptor Speaks was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in the Sound Art category at the Ivors Composer Awards 2020. The critically acclaimed album SculptOr is a suite of nine pieces based on Hepworth’s extensive writings.

With her generative sound mural The Whole Inside (2019), Louvel explored the violent misogyny of the Incels community, using Visaton piezo speakers to integrate the sound diffusion elements within the visual environment as a relief sculpture. Other recent commissions include designing the sound vocabulary for pipetting robot Andrew+ by Andrew Alliance and Not A Creature Of Paper (2019), composed for avant-garde ensemble Juice Vocal.

Previously, Louvel delved into the reigns of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I with the multimedia suite Data Regina (2017), which took the form of an interactive digital platform and a CD release, and was toured as an audiovisual set in 2018.

Louvel has been an active member of the international network female:pressure. In 2013, she took part in the compilation in support of Pussy Riot’s freedom. In 2016, she contributed the audiovisual Afraid Of Women to the female:pressure campaign to raise awareness for the special de facto autonomous zone in northern Syria, Rojava.

She holds a MA in Digital Music and Sound Art from DMSA, University of Brighton.

For more information visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/olivia-louvel-hepworth-resounds-tickets-154830824163