Olivia Louvel

My practice is built upon a long-standing exploration of the voice, sung or spoken, and its manipulation through digital technology, as a compositional method.

Exploring aesthetic principles through a cross-disciplinary approach, my research investigates the interplay of voice and sculpture, surveying three modes of relationship:

(1) METAMORPHIC, a sculpted voice, yet immaterial, in the fields of electroacoustic and digital music, performance art, en route to become sculpture with 3D printing

(2) SYMBIOTIC, a technological or acoustic partnership through a wide range of ‘voice sculptures' with at its origin the ancient phenomenon of speaking statues

and (3) ECHOIC, the agency of voice within a sculptural extended space.

The aim is to demonstrate how voice and sculpture a priori two opposite entities are in fact interlinked and co-dependent through manyfold relationships. In my search I hope to identify and find a materialist voice, a voice whose matter is alive, agentive, and performative, a voice I can touch as much as it touches me.

Spanning across two departments, my research is supervised by multidisciplinary artist Amy Cunningham in Fine Art, and author/curator Dr Kersten Glandien, in Sound Art.

I have been awarded a travel and research grant by the Henry Moore Foundation to investigate Lukas Kühne' s sound sculpture in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland.

Research outputs include: ‘A generative sound mural: The Whole Inside. Sounding the body’ published in Leonardo Music Journal, MIT Press p.29-32 (2020); ‘The Whole Inside’ published in ‘Future Now, Aesthetica Art Prize 2021: 125 contemporary artists’, pp.148-149 (2021); ‘The Sculptor Speaks’, an audio-visual installation at The Hepworth Wakefield (2021) - nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in Sound Art at the Ivors Composer Awards 2020; 'Doggerland Channels', a sound art installation at Phoenix Art Space (2022) for Sound Art Brighton.