‘It was my first ever paid commission - I was collaborating with some really amazing writers and artists from across the UK, having in-depth discussions with curators as to how best to present the work, and presenting to new audiences … there was this really overwhelming rush after the performances, people coming up and discussing them with me - and that was when I knew that this had moved on and meant something to people. Ultimately, if my work can create this sense of solace for someone, then that’s how I define it as being successful - if the work addresses subject matter that isn’t talked about enough, or that people find sometimes hard to articulate in everyday conversation. I think that the theatrics of soundscapes, and being enveloped in a performance space, is a real conduit for sharing feeling’.

Lucy cites her residency with La Consulate in Paris as a particularly eye-opening moment in terms of realising the potential of collaborative practice. La Consulate is an environmental collective of writers, artists, musicians and activists, whose aim is to encourage making and exchange across borders, and Lucy worked with them to deliver a project with fellow Leeds-based artist Sunny Vowles. The work incorporated poetry, translation, music, dance, and design. ‘It was this amazing repository of ideas … I think collaboration is the best way of working, more than ever post-Brexit and in this very isolating time. Working with people, pooling resources, ideas, energy - and also just for sanity, it’s amazing having someone to just be with you’.

The pandemic has offered us a chance to reassess our relationship with many things, sound included. ‘I noticed a lot in lockdown that being amongst the same sounds all the time encourages an active listening experience, and knowing that other people are having the same experience encourages a sense of collectivism.’ It was this awareness that led to the formation of Foldable Sounds, with university friends Daniela Geraci and Isabelle Pead last May. ‘The three of us had been doing a lot of Zoom calls, and we were thinking about the repetition of sounds that we were hearing within our dwellings, and thinking how a new or varied soundscape might change experiences of isolation, and that led to this project. It’s not live in the same way as work we would have done together in galleries or public forums, but we’ve been drawing people together through social media and the internet. They’re really powerful tools not to be dismissed - of course there’s the question of digital poverty, and I can only begin to imagine what it’s like not to have access to a computer or a phone. But for those involved it’s been a really precious social experience’.

Is there anything about the medium of sound in particular that lends itself to the collaborative process? ‘Sound art was never something that I’d considered as a medium before university. But once I started helping with projects and then getting into it myself, I realised that it’s something a lot of people can access, that you can very quickly bring communities together with. You can also send a sound file across the world, there’s an instant connectivity.’

‘Sound can either slowly broach your ears or blast its way into existence. There’s an urgency to sound, to the experience, it’s calling attention to something. I think the most recent example was the Black Lives Matter vigil that we had in Leeds last year. It was this amazing huge cacophony of sounds and voices, there was this presence: this is a protest.’ Recording sound can also be understood as a political act: ‘As the person recording, I am choosing what I record and what I share. And just by me being in a space, my presence is gendered, it’s racial, it’s socially and temporally particular. So sounds might have dominion over a site, but it’s me as the recordist who has control, and so it’s my choice as to what I inspire or what I extinguish.’