The Bob & Roberta Smith Field Recordings of Frome
Bob and Roberta Smith
Bob and Roberta Smith’s commission for Independent State combined local history, the specificity of language to place, reflections on the value and place of culture with the artist’s trademark combination of the mechanisms of political campaigner, sign writer and comedian.
The artist was inspired by what he described as a ‘slightly hazy recollection’ that old field systems were known by descriptive names. Smith asked Foreground staff to try and discover whether there were any records of the now unused names of fields around Frome. Enlisting local Frome historians, the discovery of antique maps of the local area in the town museum provided the artist with a wealth of evocative phrases: Reeds Drang, Spit Corner, Gibbons Salmon, The Mize Maze, Titts Woods. Smith then set about working with local people to experiment with form and meaning. Early July saw Smith stage Sing the Field Names of Frome – a workshop where local people joined him to make placards of the field names and form a makeshift choir to sing deliberately discordant, intoxicatingly manic arrangements of the field names.
As summer developed, Smith returned to Frome to interview local people about the field names but this soon developed into an extended conversation on the town and ideas of culture, politics and local identity. A series of mobile broadcast units were then constructed by local people to broadcast these ‘field recordings’ in the carnival procession and at other locations in the town on carnival day. The broadcast units appeared like peddle-powered political campaign vehicles – bright red tricyles fitted with bespoke structures to carry Smith’s signature sign written placards and battery powered public address system tannoys.
The tricycles, ridden by a picture framer, a community development worker, a music archivist and a plumber, and baring the placards and broadcasting the voices of the townspeople, led the carnival procession acting as self-reflexive three-wheeled heralds to give forgotten notions of the local landscape new prominence in the context of reflection on the contemporary tensions between city and country, politics and culture.
