The Lyre of Elysium

Slugtown is pleased to present The Lyre of Elysium, a solo exhibition by UK-based artist Kiik Amor, presented off-site at The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, London. Working within the field of performance, experimental design and sonic arts, Kiik Amor’s work is based in world-building for alter-experience. They present speculative worlds that represent queer / nb / trans sonic narratives through multidisciplinary performance architectures. The exhibition is centred around a large-scale biomorphic cast aluminium sound sculpture, taking the form of an Aeolian harp – a stringed instrument played by the wind. Originally presented at Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland, as part of The North East Emerging Artist Award 2025, the work draws from a portrait of Elizabeth Delaval from 1774 in which she is posed holding a medieval lyre-harp. This image, symbolic of her expeditions into spiritual meditation, poetry, literature, and music – activities through which Elizabeth charted an inner life beyond the constraints of her time – became the basis for Amor’s speculative sculpture: an abstracted futuristic realisation of the instrument in the painting, bringing Elizabeth’s interior world into material and sonic form. Utilising processes including 3D printing, metal casting, welding, grinding, and polishing, Amor took the structure of the lyre-harp, and transformed it into an experimental instrument – an object acting as a portal between past and imagined futures. Resonating through the space is a multichannel soundscape composed by Amor, recorded by placing highly sensitive contact microphones and transducers directly onto the surfaces of the harp, capturing detailed frequencies and resonances hidden from the audible range. Through a daily process of re-tuning the harp – drawing on medieval / celestial tuning systems and experimental / improvisational approaches – the instrument becomes an ever-changing generative process. With each tuning, new compositions revealed themselves with the harp remaining in a state of flux: de-tuning, re-sounding, and never fixed. The resulting spectral and layered composition is an accumulation of these shifting states. A sonic representation of the harp’s interactions with touch, air, space and time. Throughout the course of the exhibition Kiik and invited guests will activate the harp in a series of live performances in full dressage. Slugtown is an artist-run gallery based in Shieldfield, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

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