Erica Whyte
About the Artist
Erica Whyte is an artist working through sound, sculpture, and visual arts. Her practice is shaped by culturally significant objects and folklore that connect her experiences as a Canadian and Caribbean.
While receiving awards by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council she has participated in residencies with arts groups such as Ukai and X in Residence, over the past year, her work has been shown in several group exhibitions across Canada, including Capsules Studio, It’s Ok Studio, Ukai, Design TO, Vector Festival, InterAccess, Charles Street Video, and Cooper Coles’ X in Residence, as well as internationally at Such As Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.
Compositions for if a song was a vessel
What song do these vessels remind you of?
If you had to write a song for them, how would it sound? What would it feel like? Where would it be heard?
This body of ceramic work is rooted in sound. Through material, shape, and function, the vessels consider ceramics in relation to sound systems and instrumentation, exploring the ways sound makes us feel, move, remember, and act.
The project is informed by somatic approaches to art-making, which connect creative expression to bodily awareness and internal sensation; cymatics and the visualization of sound through matter; and Pauline Oliveros’ practice of Deep Listening, which proposes listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear.
It also draws from explorations in ambient music, Black experimental sound, and electronic music histories.
This project includes four ceramic vessels, each paired with an original musical composition. The vessels incorporate elements of plant life special to the Caribbean, beading, charms, knots/macramé, and small inset shakers embedded within their lids. Together, they exist somewhere between instrument, sound system, container, and sculpture.
Each accompanying composition moves through soundscapes of light percussion and ambient noise, drawing on musical boxes, and girlhood. Companion objects include a prototype ceramic speaker and additional beaded elements to extend the atmosphere and sonic world of the vessels.
Overall, this project is interested in sound as a site of alternative ways of being and imagining. It reflects on Black experimental and electronic music histories, particularly the ways Black artists have shaped and transformed sonic technologies, improvisation, performance, and the avant-garde.
The work pulls on ideas found in Assembling a Black Counter Culture, which traces Black contributions to techno and adjacent electronic music; as well as Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, which considers Black performance, improvisation, and sound.
It is also deeply inspired by Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, particularly its consideration of utopia as a space for thinking through alternative states of being, doing, and living. Sound then becomes a way of rehearsing or making other possibilities for creative life.
These vessels ask us not only to look but to listen, and perhaps to imagine what kinds of worlds might sound through them.