recordings of place and people begun a decade after sudden near-death
archived in soundcloud
These one minute recordings – an ongoing series – are the artist’s rest-of-life response to a sudden near-death experience: an arterial haemorrhage that happened at home on a quiet afternoon just days after the birth of her first child. A miraculous ambulance arrived in just over a minute, but Shadrick’s internal clock was already reset to what she calls ‘the slow time of accidents’.
In the first years after the emergency, Shadrick worked for a time as a hospice life-story scribe – wishing both to render service to those facing death, and to understand better her own close encounter with it. Listening to those at end of life, she became fascinated by the brief moments that seemed to last and resurface in memory – replayed on repeat, so it seemed, by those she met.
On the tenth anniversary of the emergency, she began the One Minutes recordings. The sound of wind in the leaves of the sculptor David Nash’s Ash Dome; crows calling in Japan; the stream behind her husband’s childhood home; singing with her young daughter; birdsong in an English churchyard; a fire in the grate: the One Minutes recordings move between the rare and mundane – those alternating currents from which all our lives are composed.
Click on the title of each image to listen to its recording – and then others – in Soundcloud…
The One Minutes archive is updated annually in Soundcloud
Tanya Shadrick 