RICHIE CULVER

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Chain Forest extends Culver’s chain guitar, an improvised instrument rooted in Hull’s distinctive lineage of industrial and experimental music. Its construction reflects a wider DIY tradition of producing sound through available materials and transforming functional objects into instruments. The original chain guitar uses a contact microphone attached to a small drum stand, amplifying the vibrations of suspended chains into a dense, distorted sound that evokes ecclesiastical howls, industrial machinery and an approaching storm. In Chain Forest, this mechanism is enlarged into four welded-steel structures, each approximately two metres tall. Chains replace branches, transforming the instrument into a skeletal landscape in which sculpture and sound remain inseparable. By expanding a portable, improvised device into an architectural installation, the work makes the physical structure of noise visible while locating Culver’s practice within a continuing history of experimentation, resourcefulness and industrial materiality emerging from Hull.