Neil Gillon has lived on Orkney for twenty-four years and works at the Iron Age Broch of Gurness, an imposing promontory fort on the north shore of Mainland Orkney, constructed in the first century AD.
His recent work includes installations at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and Kirkwall Gallery, Orkney.
This soundscape for the Ardagh Chalice intertwines the tradition of silver as an element of scientific study with its long and complex history in myth and imagination.
Gillon uses the atomic number of silver and the dimensions of the piece in the structure and phrasing of his composition to suggest its particular resonant frequency, or in other words, how it might sound if it could be used as either a drum, or, even a microphone.
Gillon has concealed in this soundscape a quote from James Joyces' Finnegans Wake, which refers to the original Ardagh Chalice discovered in the nineteenth century.
