Natural Frequencies – Essay by Deborah Stevenson

NATURAL FREQUENCIES | ATTENDING TO THE UNSEEN UNHEARD

It is a fact that all matter vibrates. Human and non-human, everything everywhere is oscillating at its own unique frequency.
Artist, Tracy Hill, presents a proposition: if we allow ourselves to imagine we can see the invisible, she will show us what resonance looks like.
Her new collection of installations and works on paper, NATURAL FREQUENCIES, is an invitation to consider that we all act as receivers for the myriad inescapable resonances surrounding us, many vibrating in disharmony with our own natural frequencies. In her quest to make the unseen visible, Hill reminds us that what is beyond our perception can still touch us.
Living organisms have evolved within the earth’s natural Schumann resonances and mounting research suggests that disruption of these natural frequencies, through cumulative electromagnetic pollution from manmade infrastructure, can be harmful to human health. By contrast, benign, earthborn resonances can also reach us - from fresh water in aquifers that run between ancient layers of chalk and clay buried hundreds of metres beneath our streets. Geologists and Water Dowsers can locate these water courses from changes in magnetic frequencies that take place where natural springs occur - in places such as Clerkenwell.
Tracy Hill has spent much of her life as an artist weighing the human connection with landscape and challenging easy assumptions. Through her method of slow, attentive walking and her practice of making - a fusion of traditional drawing and printmaking techniques with digital technologies and cymatics - she has quietly pursued her aim of bringing to our attention the marginal, the overlooked and neglected.
She has walked us through the vital and tranquil beauty hidden in desolate wetland terrain, revealed to us fragile ecologies threatened with harm or extinction from global heating and biodiversity loss. She has shown us that maps are not the best of guides if we want to truly know a place.
Now, as our understanding of the physical and psychological impact of magnetic field energy grows and Hill’s experience of working with specialists to explore the creative potential of such forces expands, her work asks a question: Given the exponential growth of our towns, cities and rural communities, must we attend more closely to local environmental frequencies and their affective potential?

Read the full essay here - NATURAL FREQUENCIES Final version