Jim Aitchison – composer

Composer and artist Jim Aitchison is recognized for creating musical encounters with some of the world’s leading visual artists, including Gerhard Richter, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Doris Salcedo. In 2008/2009 Tate Modern commissioned him to respond to their large scale Mark Rothko exhibition, and also in the 2008 he created a response to Doris Salcedo’s iconic Shibboleth installation, performed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. He is also the only composer to have been given a fellowship by the Henry Moore Foundation, which took place as the first of two research fellowships at the Royal Academy of Music. His work as a visual artist has developed out of these encounters and explores themes of disconnection, distance, erasure, enigma, figures in space, and limitations of symbol and notation.

What has creating art meant to you over the last year?

During the recent periods of enforced isolation, connecting the hands and fingers to pigment and paper have also helped maintain fertile connections with others in the act of sharing. For me, working in the visual domain enables the continuation of explorations and conversations previously opened in the sounding world, as well as end in itself. The cessation of music in its live form gave opportunity to ponder similar themes and ideas but in a new way. In the works presented here, fragments of notation sit in internally imagined landscapes: spaces resonant and unfamiliar.