Bill Fontana at the Wellcome Collection, London

This autumn, from 22 September–16 October, noise from the gridlocked traffic on the Euston Road in Central London will be replaced by the sound of waves breaking onto pebbles with White Sound: an urban seascape, a newly commissioned work by Bill Fontana at Wellcome Collection, supported by Camden Council, Haunch of Venison and the Socially Responsive Art and Design Hub. For three weeks, the installation will transform the urban environment of one of London’s most polluted thoroughfares with a live sound feed from Chesil Beach in Dorset. White Sound will create an entirely new acoustic architecture that challenges our sense of place and dissolves the physical sensation of being in the city within an experience of the tidal rhythms of the sea.

Pedestrians approaching Wellcome Collection along Euston Road will find themselves enveloped by the sounds of waves, which will be projected onto the street. The river of cars, buses and lorries will continue its slow progress, but the noise of engines and horns will be muted by the imported seascape. Fontana’s work contests the visual identity of the built environment and White Sound’s transparent intervention will force a new apprehension of the space we move through.

Sitting in traffic queues, time can appear to slow painfully, but the seascape evokes a natural activity that moves towards a deeper time: a continuous cycle carried over thousands of years. Placing the hypnotic sound of Chesil Beach on the congested Euston Road, White Sound raises questions about our understanding of stillness and movement, in both urban and natural environments.

Chesil Beach is formed of a unique 18 mile pebble bank, with the Fleet Lagoon on one side and the sea on the other. Its stones, largely chert and flint, are graded neatly along its length, such that fisherman arriving by night are said to be able to locate themselves by the size of the pebbles beneath their feet. The beach is part of the Jurassic Coast, and a UNESCO designated World Heritage site. Film footage from the beach will play in Wellcome Collection throughout the installation’s run.

Ken Arnold, Head of Public Programmes at Wellcome Collection says: “Bill Fontana brilliantly confuses our sense of where we are and what we are experiencing. Just by closing our eyes he manages to turn one of Europe’s noisiest and most polluted roads into a live seascape. It will be fascinating to see how the public responds to the English Channel crashing onto the Euston Road outside Wellcome Collection.”

White Sound, an accompanying video work, is available to view now on this website.

For more information please visit the Wellcome Collection website.