This research explores metaphysicality through painting, whereby I consider the painting process as residing on the peripheries of language to navigate the unknown, intangible, and irresoluteness of a birdsong encounter.

The impetus for this research enquiry specifically into transposition comes from my problematisation of translation, where I consider the translated ‘thing’ as losing its value in the process. Transposition is explored outside of its traditional musical and mathematical contexts. Instead, building on literary definitions of transposition, it is explored in an artistic research context. Whilst the research centres on the examination of Messiaen’s piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux, which is a transposition of birdsong, it is important to note that musical transposition is not the central facet of enquiry per se. Rather, I approach Messiaen’s music from the lens of an artist-researcher in painting practice. Through drawing and painting practice – understood as allied creative practices – this research considers transposition as a methodology in Messiaen’s musical interpretations of birdsong (in other words, the way he perceived birdsong as music, and transcribed it as such) and crucially, their use in visual art context.

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Writing-Thinking

Dirt is collecting on my panels as they remain on the studio floor. Dust sticks to the still-drying watercolour. Charcoal fingerprints begin to appear as my marks continue to be directed by where sound is emanating from. Mark-making has become hastier as the birdsong sounds more frequently, guided by the breaking of dawn.

The panel is becoming a site where marks are fugitive, escaping their placement by being brushed past or catching dust particles in the studio air. I am reminded of the fugitivity of the watercolour in my field notebook, where colour would smudge and bleed into the central fold when I closed the note pages before the paint had time to dry. My hastiness in transcribing my encounter with birdsong by Lake Vaccarès in the Camargue in 2019 is being repositioned before my very eyes, here, on the painted panel that is falling victim to my movements around it.

Am I creating a transpositional place where metaphysicality might become?