A beautiful piece of home made hi fi.

Charlie Bosanquet was doing a curators residency at PSsquared at the same time as my project, so she had time to really consider what to bring me. In the end she handed in a beautiful old speaker she had found in a skip, obviously home made, and with a great degree of love. I particularly found the contrast between the roughly sawed corners and the carefully jig-sawed decorative opening in front appealing. What immediately struck me about it was it’s box like quality, which I wanted to keep.

almost a little bit like a Chinese lacquer box.

Given that Charlie herself is a very talented artisan and artist maker, who specializes in containers ( belfastpuncture.com ) made from up-cycled materials, I wanted this box to reflect her taste for refining the rough. Obviously, this very taste of hers also led her to pick up this old speaker and hand it in to me.

The blue transparency both hides and reveals.

Breaking open the speaker to refurbish it, I came across it’s heart so to speak, a large, solid magnet in the shape of a big squarish ring. This magnet of course, now that it can’t play music any more, is the perfect keeper and transmitter of secrets. The idea of hiding a secret in the box, a bit like a heart, or a core that only reveals itself to the knowing, struck a chord with me. I broke up the magnet in pieces, and rearranged them, then cast them into a concrete slab, which became the bottom of the box. I carefully filled and sanded the surface of the slab, so that the hidden magnet became completely invisible.

Why such a solid bottom for a wooden box?

The only way to figure out now, what was up with this box with it’s heavy, solid bottom, would be to find the magnetic field captured in it. Which is very easy if you know what you are looking for, but not very obvious otherwise.

Revealed by iron filings on a piece of paper.

Object 16