The sonic flux was part of an open art festival running alongside the Folkestone Triennial 2025.
Installed at Gallery 66, this work featured a one-of-a-kind system enabling live plants’ natural rhythms to be read and rendered mechanically to ‘play’ musical instruments. Plants usually form a silent backdrop to our lives – part of the scenery. Yet they are what makes all life on earth possible.
Canning sees this work as an opportunity to ‘tune-in’ to the universal flow, via plants. Like switching on a radio. It is always broadcasting – we just need to tune in. It is a sonic flux – a term coined about the work of artist and musician John Cage. Cage was interested in expanding music beyond its limited existence as “time-objects” with a beginning, middle and end – towards a process. “The universe is not an object but a process, an open purposeless process, without origin, end or purpose. Art must imitate nature in her manner of operation” said Cage. The sonic flux of the world is the endless flow of sounds that preceded us since the beginning of the universe and will continue after us – beyond the span of a human life .. and beyond all life.
Ruth Canning 