Thom Holb

Holb

Residency Focus:
Sounding sculpture through field recording, resonance, and counterpoint

Thom Holb is a sound artist whose work explores the storytelling potential of sound, integrating music, sound design, and immersive audio experience. During his November 2024 Research Residency, he explored the sonic qualities of Jeffrey Rubinoff’s sculpture through close listening, recording, and compositional experimentation.

Holb spent hours collecting field recordings, percussive sounds, and performances generated through direct interaction with the sculptures, archives, and surrounding environment of the park. Although he was initially drawn to the larger steel works, he returned repeatedly to Series 6-8, finding rich resonances within their more sinuous and organic forms.

Using soft mallets and wire brushes, he produced bell-like tones that could only be captured by sensitive microphones. What first seemed like background noise gradually revealed itself as integral to the work: the sculptures could not be separated from wind, water, birdsong, and the acoustic life of the park itself.

Back in the studio, Holb built a series of instruments from samples of those recordings, combining them with field sounds gathered while moving through the park, including the dawn chorus, streams, and frogs. He has described these recordings as the basis for an ongoing body of work, all generated exclusively from sounds captured on-site at the JRSP.

Spending extended time on-site, Holb investigated the idea of counterpoint in relation to Rubinoff’s sculpture, both within the forms themselves and within their auditory resonances. His work treats sculpture and sound as mutually shaping forces, allowing the environment, the object, and the recording process to operate together as a single compositional field.