CAMILLA WELLTON · DIARY
By Camilla Wellton
You are dressed and almost ready to leave. Then a track comes on and the same outfit feels different. Your movement finds another rhythm. The room you are about to enter becomes easier to imagine. The clothes have not changed, but the experience of wearing them has.
After taking a break from fashion in 2017, I gave my expression room to move into music production. I make music and work with voice as GYNDROID. The medium changed, while my interest in shaping a felt experience continued.
With clothes, I work through material, proportion and the relationship around a body. With music, I work through rhythm, texture, duration and the movement of attention. Both can become part of how a person enters a particular state of being, or remains in touch with something they want to feel.
Electronic music can change the character of a space. A repeated rhythm offers something to move with. A new element asks for attention. A quieter passage gives another part of the composition room to become perceptible.
The listener participates in that arrangement. One person dances; another sits still and follows a detail. A piece of music can become associated with a moment, a person or a version of yourself you enjoy remembering. Hearing it again brings that relationship into the present.
Clothes can hold similar associations. You put on a garment and remember how you felt wearing it. Pair it with music, movement and a setting, and several kinds of experience begin to shape the same moment. I find that meeting between art forms full of possibility.
Working with recorded guidance makes the question of timing especially concrete. “Notice your breathing” takes a few seconds to say. Actually noticing it may take longer. You may need to settle, shift your attention or realise you were holding your breath while trying to follow the instruction correctly.
If the next sentence arrives too soon, the listener has two things to do at once. The pause is therefore part of the composition. It gives the invitation time to become an experience.
In I AWAKE, I compose original music and record audio-guided practices and soundscapes. Reading, writing and drawing sit alongside listening. The person taking part moves between different forms of attention, so the sequence needs to make those transitions understandable.
My long practice of yoga and meditation belongs to the background of that work. I have spent much of my life returning to the relationship between attention and bodily experience. Composing and recording give me another way to make an invitation into that relationship.
When I make a garment, the wearer brings a life to it that extends beyond my intention. The same is true of a recording. Someone may listen with curiosity, fatigue, impatience or the need to stop because a child calls from another room.
The composition can offer a shape for participation. The listener discovers what is available within it. That keeps the work alive for me: a carefully made experience can still leave room for another person’s own response.
Try listening to a piece you know while paying attention to the way you move. Notice where you become absorbed and where your attention wanders. You may discover a passage you have heard many times but never quite met.
Then choose what to wear. It can be interesting to see whether the morning has suggested something different.