How do you write a song about a painting?

The paintings are huge. It feels like a whole universe. How do you translate that into sound?

There's a lot more going on in our brains when we're interpreting and translating art than we really understand how to articulate. It's been a beautiful process of listening to the work, finding different ways to enter it, and thinking about what it gives to me as a landscape.

I'm here because I'm going to be doing a live response to Rachel's work with two other incredible artists. I think I was really taken by the way that the work pulls you through space. There's an intention to the way that it's been hung, and it puts you in relationship to these works.

The first room you're in, you're looking up, finding yourself in a landscape with these awesome figures. Then you're moving as if you’ve walked up a hill and you're looking down at landscapes. You're going from these two very different perspectives. And so I think the thing that I found really fascinating, exciting, juicy, gorgeous to get into is that the scales allow you to zoom in, zoom out, see all of these different things, and feel yourself in different proximities to what's happening.

I spent a lot of time sitting with the paintings, where I could sing to the pieces and see what just seeped out, which I think really mirrors my understanding of Rachel Jones's approach to her work. It's very led by intuition. The piece that I was working from felt like a landscape with lots of different sceneries that I could move through.

I liked the sense of succession. I decided to cut a tiny piece of the painting out that I found interesting, to then use as a score, which helped me a lot trying to interpret diagrams or shapes as sound.

Rachel had picked the head up around the painting from the collection. The hound is baring its teeth, and you can't really tell if the hound is smiling or sort of grimacing or baring its teeth aggressively. I started to look at all the smiles in Rachel's painting, the same way I’ve tried to have something that feels that ambiguous in terms of mood and feeling.

There were so many ideas or motifs that we all picked up on—externalizing, birthing landscapes, and actually quite an activist sentiment of trying to reimagine worlds. New worlds are born through open mouths, so “Mouthing Love,” which is the name of the final piece.

There were landscapes that defied capture, the kind we have conveniently caught in our mouths these days, choking on the magnitude of the ash left behind by the earthquakes we have manufactured from fear that hold not. And were not scams that defy capture. There were landscapes that defied capture.