As part of the University of Stirling Art Collection’s year of Art & Science, the exhibition, Sound and Sight is currently on display in Gallery Three, Pathfoot. In this blog post, collections volunteer Emily gives us an insight into some of the work on display.
‘Sight and Sound’ is the theme of the exhibition held in Gallery Three in the Pathfoot Building, created by the University of Stirling Art Collection. It explores the intersections between what we see and what we hear, and how artists have worked to create modes of translation between the two senses. The artworks presented within this exhibition illustrate how artists have visually represented and interpreted sound and audio.
The ‘Sight and Sound’ exhibition is part of the Art and Science Exhibition Series, the University research theme chosen as the inspiration for the 2025-2026 exhibitions, events and workshops. This theme explores the shared communities of practice between artists and scientific researchers – the human quest for visual understanding.
The exhibition includes artworks by Katy Dove, Jennifer R Wicks, Alan Davie, Norman McLaren and Michael Tyzack alongside a short film and an interactive painting application ‘Painting Music’, where visitors have the opportunity to have a musical composition created in response to their own artworks.
Katy Dove, Score (2010)
Katy Dove (1st December 1970 – 27th January 2015) was a British mixed-multimedia artist who worked across a variety of mediums including installations and animations. She was born in Oxford and grew-up in the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. She initially studied psychology at the University of Glasgow before later attending Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee in 1996, where she specialized in sculpture.
Dove is best known for her vibrant and colourful yet contemplative artwork, strongly influenced by her background in psychology and interest in art therapy. Her collaborative approach involved incorporating sound and music into her work. She undertook various musical projects as well as co-founding the band Muscles of Joy, a Glasgow based band composed of other artists. Dove was interested in the intuitive relationship between image and sound and how they can capture everyday experiences. She often composed musical scores to accompany her aminations, featuring geometric and organic moving forms and colourful patterns.
Katy Dove’s artwork ‘Score’ is an etching that is part of a suit of four artworks (DAB, FACE, Score and CAGE) produced after Dove participated in ‘The Associates’ exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in 2009 and worked with DCA print studio. These works form a series referred to by Dove as ‘Audio Visual Musical Forms’, inspired by Norman McLaren’s 1967 publication. Dove reinterprets McLaren’s approach in these works, exploring the relationships between sound, movement, text, colours and form, resulting in a delicate visual manuscript presented as layered sound palettes in which colour, textual annotations and floating sound-forms materialise.
Jennifer R Wicks, Score I, II, III, IV (2023)
Jennifer R Wicks is an interdisciplinary artist and practiced-based PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. Her practice includes installations, live audiovisual performance, moving image, sound art releases and creative-critical writing.
From 2022-2023, Wicks was the Artist in Residence at the University of Stirling. During this time, Wicks conducted research for a body of work exploring themes surrounding image and sound, the materiality of film and visualising music. Norman McLaren was the main source of inspiration as a pioneering animator and filmmaker, whose work is held in the University Archive and Art Collection. The project related to Wick’s previous work where she has explored the intersections between music, drawing, film and sculpture as well as the relationship between sound and image. These four artworks were purchased by the University of Stirling from Wicks during her time as Artist in Residence.
Alan Davie, Zurich Improvisations VII (1965)
Alan Davie (28th September 1920 – 5th April 2014) was a Scottish painter and musician.
He was born in Grangemouth and was the son of James William Davie, an art teacher and painter who studied under Maurice Greiffenhagen and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris in 1925.
Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937-1940 and 1941-46, after serving in the Royal Artillery. He travelled widely and was one of the first British painters to be affected by American Abstract Expressionism, impressed by their freedom and intensity, and was influenced by painters such as Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró.
He abandoned traditional methods of composition and subject matter and sought to paint as authentically, spontaneously and free from premeditated decision making as possible. This style owes much to Davie’s interest in Zen Buddhism.
‘Although every work of mine must inevitably bear the stamp of my own personality, I feel that each one must, to be satisfactory, be a new revelation of something hitherto unknown to me, and I consider this evocation of the unknown to be the true function of any art.’
https://artuk.org/discover/artists/davie-alan-19202014
Music was also a key inspiration for Davie’s artwork. Early in his career he was a jazz saxophonist also lending his hand to other instruments including the piano, cello and bass clarinet. His paintings have also been inspiration for other musicians, such as the bassist and composer Barry Guy. His artworks have also included symbols found in sources as varied as jazz music, pottery, maps, ancient rock carvings and Aboriginal art.
Alan Davie’s artwork ‘Zurich Improvisations VII’ is one of a series of 34 lithographs created by Davie in the printing studio Mattieu in Zurich, Switzerland which was primarily used to print weather charts.
Norman McLaren, Scottish Rapsody (c.1930s)
Norman McLaren (11th April 1914 – 27th January 1987) was a Scottish-Canadian animator, director and producer most known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada. He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking such as hand drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, pixilation, geographic sound and abstract film as well as being an artist and printmaker.
Born in Stirling, McLaren studied art and interior design at the Glasgow School of Art. He put together his first film in 1933, titled Seven til Five, followed by Camera Makes Whoopee in 1935. His work came to the attention of John Grierson who offered him a job with the UK General Post Office (GPO) film unit in London. In 1939 McLaren left Britain and moved to New York. In 1941 he took up an invitation from John Grierson to work at the National Film Board of Canada, which Grierson had established in 1939. In Canada, Grierson gave McLaren the freedom to experiment. He examined the various ways sound and movement could be presented on film and developed a variety of different techniques of animation. McLaren’s genius was recognised worldwide with a string of awards for his work including an Oscar in 1953 for his short film Neighbours.
Norman McLaren’s ‘Scottish Rapsody’ is one of a series of pastels dating from McLarens teens, before attending art school, in which he attempted to visualise various musical styles including Hungarian folk music, a military march, ‘oriental music by a Turkish orchestra’ and ‘hot dance music’. This artwork shows his attempt at visualising the style of Scottish music.
Michael Tyzack, Yardbird (1962)
Michael Tyzack (3rd August 1933 – 11th February 2007) was a British painter and printmaker, considered an important representative of contemporary abstract painting.
Tyzack was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire and studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1952 to 1956. In 1956 he won a French Government Scholarship that allowed him to travel to Paris and Menton, where his work began to show a tendency towards abstraction and the influence of Cezanne. In 1965 he won first prize in the prestigious John Moores’ Liverpool Exhibition for his painting ‘Alesso ‘B’’ and continued to exhibit at prominent galleries and museums in the UK and America during the 1960s and 1970s, while also working as a professional jazz trumpeter.
In 1971 Tyzack took up a short teaching post in Iowa. He originally only planned to stay one year, however, he and his family decided to remain in America after he was offered the post of Professor of Fine Arts at the College of Charleston, where he lived until his death in 2007.
Michael Tyzack’s ‘Yardbird’ is an emulsion on board which explores colour variations, playing with the perception of visitors and what they view from the artwork.
‘Pessimists see an absence of colour; optimists see the potential presence of colour.’
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/yardbird-127965
This intriguing and vibrant collection of work is open to the public Monday – Friday, 9am-5pm in the Pathfoot Building, University of Stirling, alongside the other Art & Science exhibitions.
Bibliography
https://www.stir.ac.uk/events/2024-25/art-collection/sight-and-sound
https://shop.dca.org.uk/products/score
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https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2022/february-2022-news/university-announces-new-artist-in-residence/
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https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/alan-davie
https://www.fmr-records.com/pdffiles/FMRCD168-i0905.pdf
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https://artuk.org/discover/artists/davie-alan-19202014
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https://www.animatormag.com/archive/1987/issue-19/issue-19-page-21/
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https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/yardbird-127965
