Throughout all my journeys so far, I’ve been taking audio recordings of my encounters on the mountains. This has varied from running water from streams to birdsong, people talking and children laughing. After thinking of ways to present this in the final show and give visitors an opportunity to listen, I realised that having it audible in the exhibition room at CSM may be distracting for some people and also detract from other artist’s work in the show. I then started thinking about the use of headphones, but didn’t like the idea of an MP3 player. Rather, I wanted something that reflected my personal journey which is represented in this body of work. I became excited by the idea of recording and playing it on cassette, and originally looked at sourcing a walkman – something I had almost glued to me as a child.

As they are relatively collectable now, the price of these is pretty high and somewhat unaffordable, especially as I had a specific type of walkman in mind – one of the earlier 80s/90s ones without the graphic equalizer. I then started thinking about the cassette recorders, as they aren’t as collectable and can be picked up second-hand quite cheap. I found an old Cathay on eBay, and it has just arrived.

It’s exactly what I hoped and my plan is to have it featured on display with headphones and encourage people to listen to the soundbites while they look at my work. Unfortunately however, the record button appears to be stuck, so I’m going to have a look at repairing it before I can test it. Fingers crossed I can get this to work! Then my plan is to use the old orange foam headphones that were often used when I was growing up.