In this guest artist female artist focus blog, I hear from composer, cellist and media/sound artist, Semay Wu about her creative journey, and how she found a new voice when music fell silent during the 2020 pandemic.

"Life Shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin.

Semay Writes…

“In lockdown, our homes became, in varying degrees, little worlds. Every day we slept, ate, worked and entertained ourselves within four walls. The internet boomed, connecting our eyes and ears through four-sided screens to the outside world. And while working life, and the perception of it, changed forever, the arts and music industries quickly improvised to stream culture to the masses.

Musicians increasingly began to live-stream from home, unable to perform in venues. Zoom became a global meeting room, morphing creatively into a multi-performer interface for new compositions and live improvisations. The sensuality of the live experience was repackaged to fit in with the new times, no matter what part we played in it.”

Creative Challenges in Lockdown

“I remember that there was an overriding pressure for all of us to carry on creating. And some people really did. But for myself, it wasn’t easy. At least, for a good while. Making a living through music was a mixture of composing, performing, researching, curating, organising, writing applications, teaching, recording and more. The things I could still do from home gave me no joy.

The cello became an absent friend. Apart from a few moments, I did not take it out of the case for six months. I do feel remarkably guilty about this, but it is what it is. Since late March, I have also not learned any new software for writing music, nor have I developed a deeper understanding of coding for my electronics. I have not sat down to record any new compositions, or had the desire to research anything from my old bag of potential ideas.

From my own ramblings later in the year (I had the blissful opportunity to start work with a life coach), I realised that the joy I was receiving from music-making had hit a wall. It was tangled up in binds of knotted weeds. Having spent over 30 years in music, the feeling was pretty miserable. What is my role in music in the future, and do I need to retrain? I felt that our collective grief found its way into every room of my creativity, and gently put a stop to it.

The one project that I did want to pursue was paused through lockdown measures. A wonderful Italian residency called Museum of Loss and Renewal was earmarked for this research. It had to be postponed as it was in July. Mentally, my energy got postponed too, in re-purposing the timeline.

I was to research for a series of musical graphic-scores based on the fragility of life, in loss and grief. Having lost my Dad last September, this was an exploratory ground using a more visual and specific emotional framework. A piece I worked on last year, ‘Exquisite Corpse’, gave me the impetus to keep working through this compositional lens.”

‘Exquisite Corpse’ Graphic Score 1 of 5 - Semay Wu

‘Exquisite Corpse’ Graphic Score 3 of 5 - Semay Wu

‘Exquisite Corpse’ by Semay Wu

New Experiences

“As spring came and went, the silenced traffic gave way to the beauty of stillness. Walking became a treasure trove of clear sonic material, and birds ruled the sound-waves. It goes without saying that people were hearing things, seemingly for the first time, in vastly different ways.

On my walks, I foraged for wild garlic. I discovered an interest in local wild plants and how to use them in cooking. At the very least, I began to learn a little what was around me. It looked after my mind for a while. And little by little, I found myself rummaging in packed-away boxes.

I was looking for, and found, a bag of wool and a small wooden frame for making tapestry pieces. I bought them the year before but hadn’t ‘time’ to explore. If I could just start something, this would probably be it. So I started to weave, changing and exploring different techniques as they came to me.

It was a struggle to finish, I have to be honest. Weaving was painfully slow as I had no clue to what I was doing. Patience was really necessary. I didn’t have much. The slow-time, like slow-cooking, was the antithesis of the way one experiences time when playing music. It was akin to how you would make stop-motion animation. A small piece every day, and gradually, bit by bit, it begins to take shape. Looking back, I think it did suit my lockdown mentality quite well. Short bursts of concentration were all I could do, and that was ok.”

A New Emergence

“Ideas started to reform. I was by now sure that I wanted to explore different forms of expression away from music. If I could just re-discover the joy, and the idea of play, in conversations between mind and hand, like a direct recording of a moment, then I could perhaps work with renewed meaning. Through writing, drawing and weaving or any other method, I would re-awake that relationship, develop a daily practice, and explore the themes within the graphic-score series.

Writing was a revelation. At first, I feared a child-like diary rendition of event recording. But surreptitiously, this opened up ways to explore the conversations I wanted. One day, I decided to mark the page continuously with what I could hear. I was conscious of the conversation and producing its outcome. It gave me a ‘sensory bath’ where my curiosity was definitely pricked. I remember looking intently at the page, at the tip of the writing implement as it glided across the paper. My eyes becoming hazy as I was concentrating on what I was hearing - cars, birds, human activity. I was trying to record everything - as it happened - onto the paper in front of me, although with a one-second delay, which I tried to reduce. It was not an artistic piece as such but more an exploratory exercise that was intimately connected to me.”

“These exercises woke me up enough to regain a sense of connection to the paper. And so, I started to draw. In a happy moment, I received a drawing commission that came out of last year’s ‘Exquisite Corpse’. It gave me a real feeling of desire and opportunity to sit down properly with a pen and paper. It may sound as if this was easy, but it really wasn’t. The understanding that I have of myself, is as a musician. And it is very difficult to alter.

Through music, I have learned a complex language of movement, of listening, thinking, and visualising. Could I trust my senses and my physicality in other art-forms? I needed a little pep-talk to myself. We all have our own unique pool of experiences. What we draw out of it is unique to us. It is what it is. Self-criticisms can be quite downright nasty, and difficult to swallow.

But, if music teaches us anything, it’s that there is no point in trying to be original. It’s all been done. So I started. I made dots meet, and ideas began to form. I tried different methods and immersed myself as much as possible in the abstract.”

Charcoal Gestural Piece - part of the development/research for the work below (commissioned by Sally Lai in response to the meteorite collection of Graham Ensor)

Commissioned by Sally Lai in response to the meteorite collection of Graham Ensor

“In August, I drove down to my Dad’s house for the first time since March. While I was there, the sun greeted me every morning. I found myself outside, with a notebook and some pens. I had an eagerness to draw my dad’s garden as a record, a document of his work. Aside from the use of a camera, I felt that if I drew images, I would soak up more detail, and make an imprint on my memory. By taking a daily ‘slow-boat’ of time, I acquired a really good concentration, a conscious focus. I don’t know if it was the sun, but I felt deeply energised after each sketch.”

Looking at the Pond from the Back Door - Semay Wu

“I believe, this was when I relaxed. And I began to enjoy it.”

Female Artist Focus, Semay Wu Biography

Semay Wu (sē mā wo͞o) is a composer, cellist, media/sound artist and improviser. Her influences are drawn from electro-acoustic experiments and improvisations in sound and visual worlds, that in turn reflect human traits, energies, somatics and provocations. Using time, memory and space as a measure, Semay’s work sits in between disciplines and observes the curious contrasts and sensory disturbances that materialise.

Her pieces enjoy affiliations with devised theatre, dance, moving-image, installations and performance; and her own playing is as diverse, touching upon elements of classical avant-garde, to song-structured melodies, to noise improvisations. Current muses focus heavily on explorative drawing, a tie to the graphic score, as a vehicle to explore and encourage ‘play’ and performativity through a multi-perspective and improvisatory framework.

Website: www.semaywu.com

Female Artist Focus: Semay Wu, Rediscovering Creativity Through Lockdown