Nwando Ebizie by Edd Sanders
Nwando Ebizie: The Garden of Circular Paths
Sat 21 Aug 2021 - Sun 27 Feb 2022. Free, exhibition ticket required
Experience an immersive sound work by Nwando Ebizie, created in response to Barbara Hepworth and co-commissioned as part of Yorkshire Sculpture International.
The Garden of Circular Paths takes visitors on a sonic art guided journey through the life and work of Hepworth, featuring composed music and field recordings from places in Yorkshire and Cornwall which have a connection to Hepworth’s life.
The installation is designed for headphone listening whilst walking through Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, inviting visitors to experience it through Ebizie’s lens as a Yorkshire-dwelling Afrofuturist.
You can experience the work by downloading the Bloomberg Connects app on your own device and listening with your own headphones, or by picking up a player and headset from the Welcome Desk on the first floor of the gallery. Please note that in order to maintain a covid-secure environment, headphones are limited to one use per day on a first come, first served basis.
‘Ebizie’s The Garden of Circular Paths at the Hepworth Wakefield soothed me into a daze where I could have danced, jumped and swooped without even noticing. Through headphones, the Todmorden-based artist’s calming voice commands me to wiggle my toes, stretch and close my eyes… For 37 minutes, I am lost in the peaks, troughs and holes of Hepworth’s creations, listening to Ebizie recant her quotes like poetry. Sounds of waves crashing, a scalpel slicing, hands rubbing accompany Ebizie’s monologue, which switches between colloquial and melodic.’
– Hannah Clugston, The Guardian
About the artist
Todmorden-based multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie (b. 1982) creates Afrofuturist speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installations. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for radical change and radical transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, electronic music, and her own neurodiversity and Nigerian heritage.
Nwando’s critically-acclaimed works include the multimedia installation Distorted Constellations, left-field pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension) and ecstatic operatic experience Hildegard: Visions. She has been commissioned by and have had her works shown across the UK and internationally, including the Barbican, Brighton Festival, Science Gallery Melbourne, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Southbank Centre, BALTIC, Site Gallery, Humber Street Gallery, Rio de Janeiro’s Tempo Festival, London Sinfonietta, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Zurich’s Blok.
Later this year, Nwando’s debut album The Swan – a genre-bending work of sonic fiction mythologising an imagined matriarchal community – will be released on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records, with the single I Seduce out in May 2021.
This event forms part of a series of performances and audio-visual works made in response to Hepworth’s work presented alongside our 10th anniversary exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life.
The programme of events takes place throughout the exhibition and features new and re-staged works by artists, musicians and dancers, many of whom we have worked with over the past ten years. Please see our What’s On listings for details of all events.
Our anniversary events are free but tickets to the Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life exhibition are required. Exhibition tickets are priced at £12 / £10. FREE for Members, Wakefield District residents and under 16s. Book your ticket online.
