Its walls lined with books, hung with paintings and fitted with shelves to display the woodturned vessels with which he is making his name, Roger Bennett's front room is the perfect setting in which to take a portrait of the artist. Here, their exhibits and instruments spread before them, Dublin-based Bennett and Rob Canning, the Wicklow composer, are poised to talk about their work in a collaborative project pairing designers with composers, called Containers, which premiered at the Galway Arts Festival and is now running at the Bridge Gallery, Dublin. Everything in this room is calm, adroit, orderly.
As befits someone who spent years as an English teacher, Bennett is particularly well-prepared for the interrogation, armed with a set of notes listing all those things so important to mention, so typically forgotten as a conversation takes its natural course. But the element of the unpredictable is close by. Gestures, laughter, deliberations shake the table around which we sit as Canning's instruments - a set of Tibetan singing bowls in a dull, silvery metal - begin to resonate, their humming and chiming sounding the note for that spontaneous participation which is the objective of the Containers project.
Containers is the brainchild of curators Sean McCrum and Hilary Morley who, taking as their starting point the idea that good design is a two-way process which incorporates both the designer and the user, last year put together the exhibition Chairs for the Galway Arts Festival, one of its highlights. And just as visitors to that exhibition were encouraged not simply to stand and look at the pieces, but to try them out by sitting down and making themselves comfortable, so, this year, visitors to Containers were asked to take design beyond the boundaries of display by feeling free to participate, to touch and lift the containers in the exhibition. Roger Bennett stresses that this idea of freedom was a vital element of the project from the beginning: "We weren't commissioned to create these pieces," he points out. "Rather, people, both makers of objects - like furniture makers, woodturners and ceramicists - and composers, were invited to come up with work which would be a creative response to the word `container' ".
His own response is in the form of a series of finely turned conical bowls in sycamore, honed down to a paper-thin texture, washed in shades of blue and inlaid with delicate specks of silver, not unlike curving musical staves in their pattening. The bowls are silken to touch, almost weightless to lift. Despite the emphasis placed on ideas of everyday use and function in the brief for the project, Bennett is concerned to preserve the aura of beauty and delicacy which he works hard to achieve with these pieces. "They're more potential containers than actual containers," he admits. "I like to think of them as containing contemplations, rather than being designed to contain objects like fruit."
The curators expect that, during the course of the exhibition, the bowls will come quite literally to contain contemplations, as visitors are encouraged to write their thoughts and comments on pieces of paper and place these in the receptacle of their choice. But Canning, too, sees in these bowls an element of ephemeral perfection which, perhaps, he would be loathe to see disturbed; it was from photographs of Bennett's work-in-progress that he took inspiration for his own piece.
"These bowls jumped out at me, really, for the slight otherworldliness about them, as well as the symmetrical structures," he says. "So from there I took that and said, I'll incorporate these ideas and try and bring out that symmetry, and that strange sheen that comes from them, within the music."
Rob Canning also views the project as having brought him to a sharper awareness of the intricacies of his form; as a composer, he realised, he worked at a fundamental level with the concept of containment, with ideas of form and content merging into one. "Very often when I start thinking about a piece," he says, "I think in ideas of form rather than ideas of melody; my ideas are very often given their initial stimulus by shapes. The whole idea of the ellipses and the circles on these bowls gave the idea of spiralling, so that the music sort of slowly unfolds, working from the bottom up, and you never hear the full linear melodic idea in its entirety at any one time, you just hear overlapping, overlaying fragments."
As well as being performed live on two occasions, Canning's composition, like that of the four other composers involved, feature in recorded form throughout the exhibition. In his case, the live performance also incorporates recorded sound. As he explains, the impetus provided by this project to experiment with the singing bowls, and eventually to create a montage of their sounds, afforded him a chance to move beyond the reservations he had about the marriage of music and multimedia.
"This is the first time I've incorporated electronics into my work," he explains. "Before this, I'd concentrated mainly on instrumental music. I'd kind of shied away from the whole multimedia thing. As a young composer with a knowledge of sound technology, I think it would be very dangerous to get involved in the whole multimedia frenzy to the detriment of strong compositional ideas."
For both Bennett and Canning, special effects must take second place to the twists and turns which a piece will take, often beyond the control of the artist, in the course of its composition. Bennett describes how the piece of wood itself, rather than the fixed ideas of the woodturner, can sometimes dictate the direction in which the creative process will move, by virtue of the interesting defects it may have, such as the deep countours caused by fungi.
The composer, too, can find his own ideas diverted by external factors, and this, stresses Canning, is a compromise which only the skilled artist can deal with efficiently: "I think it's very important to learn the craftsmanship of composition before you launch into anything. It's essential. Because, in Roger's case, he's making it work, the finished project. In my case, it's got to go through somebody else, the performer. You have to learn a craftsmanship of communication between the composer and the performer, and the audience."
Bennett agrees; to him, the feedback he has received at ground level during craft fairs is just as important as the judgements which come from on high in the form of professional criticism. And ultimately, he sees, it is the perspective of the user, the buyer of a piece, which decides the meaning of that piece, regardless of the vision of the artist: "I would like these pieces to be displayed, and that people would feel free to touch them," he says, "but I don't have any control. What people choose to do with them, I mean, that's part of the process - that is their choice."
Containers: objects and sounds is at the Bridge Gallery, Dublin, until the end of the month
