Diaphone

Lisa Stansbie’s project for the festival consists of creating a sound and film work that will respond to the location, architecture and history of Flat Holm, an island located five miles from Cardiff Bay in the Bristol channel and the most Southerly point in Wales.

The site responsive research focuses on the presence and absence of sound and sound ‘machines’ on Flat Holm Island. The resulting artwork responds to the location, architecture and its histories in relation to the connection between sound and water. The sea conditions around Flat Holm were particularly dangerous for ships (there are many documented accounts of shipwrecks) prior to the foghorn station and the earlier lighthouse being built. The project documents and develops ideas from the now inert Foghorn Station (dating from 1908), which, when it was active, would sound warning blasts that could be heard from the Welsh coast.

Alongside this approach to architectural features on the island the work researches the historical narrative of the first wireless messages to be sent across water from Lavernock to Flat Holm which were developed by the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi in 1897.