David Tremlett

There’s a piece at the Tate that was made of cassettes. On each of them is the sound of one county in England. But all you hear is the water or the wind or the rain. That’s it. Sometimes you hear the sound of a bird. In essence, it’s something with no mechanical sounds, ‘it was a silent sound landscape.’ […] Then there was a piece where I worked with a tap dancer. She tap danced and I made recordings. Charles Harrison from Studio International and Art & Language took an exhibition to New York of some artists [The British Avant-Garde, 1971]. It was an important exhibition for the time. I showed musical paper and drew some ideas on it. I recorded Karen Bernard tap dancing. These recordings I still have. She’d dance, let’s say, for one minute. This was then put on a loop. Some of the exhibitions that were made were just this noise of Karen’s dancing coming from one corner of the room. Maybe in another corner, there’d be another sound of tap dancing. So there was a room with the history of a person dancing. It was somewhere between music, writing, sound and installation.

— David Tremlett, “Conversation with David Tremlett,” by Sophie Richard, February 23, 2005, UNCONCEALED, THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF CONCEPTUAL ARTISTS 1967-77: DEALERS, EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLIC COLLECTIONS