‘Landscaping’, a collaboration between painter/illustration Amanda Niekamp and sound artist Thom Kolb, is the coming together of two distinct artistic practices that have circled and supported the other for the last five years. Our individual approaches have a common thread in seeking presence, whether by recontextualizing the contact between the man-made and the (super)natural through colour, texture and form or by ‘zooming in’ upon waveforms, isolating resonant frequencies and tonal fragments, reshaping, and composing from the manipulation of raw material. In combination, these visual and sonic elements allow the viewer to feel an immersive ‘sense of place’ rather than viewing a pure documentation that others an unfamiliar landscape.

Below we’ve provided excerpts from our fall 2024 exploration of the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, a 200 acre open air gallery of over 100 monumental works by the late sculptor located on Hornby Island, BC. The digital paintings and compositions are intended to be viewed/listened to in tandem, a conversation between two mediums that present a singular portrait of a magical place. Thom had this to say about the experience:

I spent 3 days collecting hours of field recordings, percussive sounds and performances from interacting with the sculptures, archives and surroundings of the park. I was initially drawn to the larger steel forms but found myself coming back to Series 6-8 – there was so much resonance that could be teased from these sinuous, organic pieces, and I began to play with soft mallets and wire brushes to create bell tones that could only be picked up by sensitive microphones.  I attempted to isolate these frequencies from what felt at first like background noise, but it became clear that doing so diminished the value of the recordings – ultimately, the sculptures are inextricable from their surroundings.

Back in my studio I set to work building a series of instruments created from samples of the recordings, which were then played in tandem with a mixture of field sounds I’d collected as I strolled the park: the dawn chorus, bubbling streams and shy frogs. I’ve presented 5 short examples, though there’s worlds of works that could come from these recordings and I continue to manipulate and experiment with these sounds very much in the same way that I experiment with physical instruments. It should be made clear that in each piece all of the sounds you hear are solely created from recordings in the park – there are no external samples, or virtual instruments present.”

Find out more about the park and Jeffrey Rubinoff’s work at https://www.rubinoffsculpturepark.org/

In 2026 we’ll be attending the Manang Residency in Ngawal, Nepal.  In Ngawal, a village that is both a spiritual hub and a gateway for thru-hiking, sound is an ever present character: the bells of temples, high winds, wild ponies, indigenous birds such as the Monal, and silence itself. The mountainous valley where the residency is sited is a gateway to an enormous sky, the thin air wisping through vegetation uniquely acclimatized to the conditions.