Claire Rousay constructs fluid mosaics full of sudden shatterings of colourful glazes. In shifting light, the entire construction slips among its pieces, scuttling into rearrangements, which, like alchemy, set up one neoteric experiment after another.
Onomatopoeic listening. Words like “scuttling” and “alchemy” actually quite accurately capture the tone of Rousay’s percussive palette, as if she’s pattering among alphabets made of wood or skins or stone, turned to flesh. And chimes that steal my heart. Messages of the similarity and of the difference that surrounded us and imposed new combinations. And glimpses into the depths of our ignorance.
Among the tiny pieces of this tangential pattern, motifs emerge, like a scrunching of heavy paper (lately, I keep ripping the pages of my diary right out) and a single booming drum hit honestly and repetitively as a kind of call to arms, ominous, for an impending doom, perhaps, and what is built using those bits post-destruction. The glass, a window, a mirror, by design. Descriptions that reject prescriptive understandings. Working towards solutions, not even methodically, but hypothetically and completely. Sounds of an involuntary faith, which is what faith is.
It Is Just So Much More Difficult is out now on cassette and pay-what-you-wish digital via French label Falt.
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