Timothy Firth, founder of common AREA maintenance, is finishing up a large project for the newly renovated Town Hall Seattle, where he is the current artist-in-residence.
Along with four large walnut tables, lighting fixtures, and the most exquisite lectern you’ve ever seen, he built a sculpture incorporating 100-year old organ pipes, relics of the Christian Science Church that once inhabited the building.
The sculpture has dramatic textures produced by hand-selected cuts of local woods. It exists in three parts and spans the length of the Reading Room’s east wall, hinting at the shape of a sound wave and meant to modify the resonance of the room.
Timothy Firth gesticulating in front of the sculpture.
Interview edited for clarity.
WB :: Can you explain, at this point, how you define your practice ?
TF :: My practice has taken many shapes over the past 10 or 15 years but currently I would qualify it as sculpture - building objects or experiences that have a directed, long-term place in the world and have a dedicated life.
Objects are oftentimes created and disposed of and my goal as an artist, for the past five years in particular, is to create objects or experiences that have a pre-established language around where they are generated, why they are generated, where they go to next, and what their long-term life cycle looks like. I want to see everything I make have a loop built into it and a narrative as to where or why it’s going some place.
WB :: Why do you primarily work with wood?
TF :: I think it’s a form that’s very easily manipulated. When I was painting, or engaging in other mediums such as photography, there was a limitation to my interaction with it. When I started working on more sculptural projects, using materials such as wood and metal, there were mechanisms that allowed me to pull its shape in more complicated directions, it was appealing.
WB :: The forms you’ve used are full of sharp geometric angles and natural textures – were these decisions a purely aesthetic conceit or is there some sort of translation that goes on between concept and physical sculpture?
TF :: Certainly the geometry is attractive to me and I can relate to it, can understand it, even the manufacturing of certain geometric forms feel more fluid in practice. Though in this instance the geometry is designed to interact with how sound waves respond to the environment.
The sculpture is intensely geometric but it interacts with the sound generated in the room, be it speech, music, or laughter. Those resonant qualities have a quantifiable interaction with the sculpture and the sculpture is a platform for me to manipulate that.
WB :: It is a kind of abstract sound sculpture, almost a resonant instrument. Is it interactive?
TF :: It interacts with the voices, conversations, and music we create in the Reading Room. The sculpture is designed to scatter sound waves, holding certain frequencies back and amplifying others. That process allows people to have a more clear and potent audio experience. Think of it as an equalizer.
I’ve designed the sculpture to mimic the original organ pipes and they became a core road map as this was being manufactured. Each of the components is built with a set of cleats that allow me as artist-in-resident to change the sculpture’s shape. During a series of public events, I will be recording sounds to later refine the sculpture and enhance the room’s resonance.
WB :: As far as components in the sculpture how and why did you choose the wood that you did?
TF :: 40% is recycled material from Town Hall itself - that was an obvious answer in regards to sustainability and infusing it with the historical energy the space deserves.
I tried to use as much recycled material as possible, including the steel. I used local domestic woods, not stained or covered in any harsh chemicals.
The material is dominantly walnut, cherry and ash which we get them from a local source. Cherry in particular I fell in love with. A lot of wood will evolve with the sun’s UV rays and cherry does in a beautiful way; it gets richer and darker while a lot of other woods will get lighter or burnt out.
Personal history and experience affects all of us and enriches/deepens our perspective, and I think the idea of using a material that will continue to evolve in a specific way optically, growing every day, was an underlying element in this. It’s the first large project where I used cherry. I was kind of stunned at how complex it was.
WB :: Do you see these organic/dynamic elements in contradiction to the form?
TF :: I don’t see it as a contradiction- I see it as an ask. You have to ask yourself to look beyond the form. One of the elements that draw you into using this material is the fact that it’s constantly moving, unpredictable.
Each piece of wood is wildly unique, each tree grows under a particular set of stresses and those affect grain patterns, luminosity and density and so on, all of those elements you can gather together and find different vehicles to find or enhance that. The structure of the material unavoidably holds those organic, unpredictable, and wild forms.
WB :: You use organ pipes from the building’s origin as a Christian Science Church. How much research did you put into this when developing the sculpture idea and how much does that inform the forms the sculpture took?
TF :: Quite a bit, I read as much as I could find in regards to the history of the building and its previous communities. While those histories influenced me in a certain sense I would say the bigger influences were some of the stories I heard from the people at Town Hall and members of my community, as well as my own personal experience. All of these foundational ideas in regards to longevity and stability and accessibility, those things are the core contemporary histories that are really driving my thinking around the sculpture.
One of the stories that has really guided me: some of the leadership folks at Town Hall actually went up to the upper portion of the building where the pipes used to be and were able to find a G note together. The G is an open cord representative of harmony and community, elements symbolic of what Town Hall has been to me, and that sparked a thought. Could this sculpture represent and magnify the intention behind that chord? Maybe it takes more time to suss that out but I think that very intentional experience for them catalyzed a lot of my thinking around what the sculpture should be. In a lot of ways the sculpture does represent numerically those underlying chord structures. I’ve built in some language and numbers in the physicality of it.
WB :: Can you elaborate on that language?
TF :: There’s a formula that allows us to quantify how sound waves interact with physical objects, and there are a couple of formulas that allow me to do that, and you can shift those around, you can build in a phrasing. I recorded myself singing and speaking certain phrases and examined those audio waves and took away key components and let those wave forms influence how I was building the sculpture. Building in little voices or chords in the physical realm is something I’ve been doing as a nod to the building, the administration, and the intention. Those are the little things you don’t necessarily see but for me it feels important to build some deeper intentionality behind what I’m doing.
WB :: They’ve rebuilt town hall to last another 100 years. Barring living forever, is there a road map or guide to how this sculpture can be manipulated by the future artists that inhabit Town Hall, is that a possibility, what happens to the sculpture over time?
TF :: There’s a wide spectrum of possibilities. It could live on as a way to modify the resonance of the room and that’s kind of the foundational idea. It’s also a living thing, too. I could imagine any number of contemporary artists in Seattle in that space, taking that sculpture and growing the idea of it being a resonant instrument, growing out of the ideas in a voice all of its own. I would love it if we could strike a chord at the very beginning that this could be changed, modified, and used.