Patrick Ward is an artist working within moving image, sound and music in various modes of exhibition, performance and installation. In their music the environment of the sound source, the materiality of recording devices, and the apparatus through which music is shared and heard feature as active sonic figurations. Using iPhone recordings, low-res YouTube rips, warped mixtapes and weak wifi signals Ward embraces the technical limitations of the everyday. Grounded in the sonic explorations of their youth in Sheffield – where they learned to mix jungle records on old belt-drive turntables, obsessively rewatched Fantazia and Rave Nation on static riven VHS tape, and sampled pirate radio using cheap Tandy cassette players – their approach to musique concrète evades the strictures of its institutional heritage by embracing the socio-technics of bass music and sound system culture.
Ward’s music is part of a wider audio-visual practice that explores the human relation to technology. Operating between the gallery, auditorium, stage and club, the work is reassembled and reconstructed: often transcribing audio compositions into visual forms, condensing multi-channel gallery installations to single-screen live performances, or presenting audio works by withholding the image-track of a film. Ward’s recent work focuses on the object and formation of the screen itself as a sonic register through which its more opaque qualities might be articulated. Screens appear as thresholds, frames that mark and delineate space; they capture overlapping and contesting states between waking and sleeping, interior and exterior, attention and distraction.
Ward’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Museum Of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal; and Hollybush Gardens, London. Their music has been published by Café Oto as Taku Roku and Otoroku releases and their self-released album Enthusiasm (2020) was described by filmmaker Mike Hoolboom as "like nothing else on Bandcamp. Filled with meticulously detailed cinematic scenes that are forever shifting, it rewards close attention.”
