Simon's speakers

I took photographs of Simon’s speakers, which are downstairs in our basement/living room. They are very beautiful objects that he handcrafted with his friend, John, who is a carpenter. While I photographed them; getting the right set-up and focussing in on the warm wood grain, I was totally reminded of the Oceanic art-objects I pored over in my master’s degree. Specifically, malanggan from New Ireland, which are elaborately carved wooden beings that house spirits. These are ephemera that also act as agents in Melanesian society, which is what also made me think of the speakers. I mean, they’re beautifully crafted objects that house the spirit of music, and what has more agency than that? 

Simon’s speakers are what give life to parties – without them people wouldn’t want to stay downstairs, into the small hours of the morning. Whenever he plays his vinyl the housemates congregate to listen, unwittingly sometimes yet the timbre and resonance hold us there. While I took close-ups of Simon's speakers I kept in mind the story of makers in Inuit society, who extended their personhood into art-objects as they crafted them, so that the maker and the made are part of the same thing. If you didn’t do that, they said, the object would never become true.

Simon said this about making his speakers

It took me about five or six years to get all the parts, from eBay – searching online; the drivers are from America. The design is from the 1960s, these loudspeakers were the ones used for public speaking. Lots of people get the parts and make their own speakers. Once we got everything (just before my thirtieth birthday) we decided to build them. Building took about two weeks – it was quick because John ran out of space in his workshop, so for a time the speakers lived in my clinic. My patients would ask, ‘What’s that?’ when they came in to see me.

The wood is walnut and valchromat, an environmentally friendly MDF that’s coloured all the way through. Ours is yellow, so we put wood oil on it to enhance the colour – at first, we used the wrong type of oil so it went really brown, looked like a turd. We had to sand it back down and then this time we used yellow oil and it worked. It wasn’t my first choice to go for these expensive woods, and the walnut weighs a tonne, so I can’t carry the speakers around like a sound system, but John wanted to got for the aesthetic choice. Even though the speakers are really heavy they’re beautiful.

They became the object they wanted to be, I guess. They’re never leaving this room though – we got them down the stairs with about an inch to spare.