Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

A Sound Portrait

For his artist residency at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Gino created improvisational Sound Portraits of the Royal Conservatoire representing the building, its function, its inhabitants and the diverse creative activities that embody the spirit and vitality it portrays. Gino responded by sketching and drawing translating the sound environment within the building his process allowe him to be the recording device giving a human approach of the translation of sound into the visual. Pythagoras declared "The eyes are made for astronomers, the ears for harmony, and these are sister sciences"  Gino reflects on this approach and creates works which are about the relationship of the senses. He uses the basic human senses of taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight and the lesser-known senses of spatial awareness and balance to make his work. The senses send information to the brain which inform an individual reality, it is this interpretive individual reality Gino portrays while creating a conversation for his work.

Through Performance Drawings, live visual sketches Gino creates visual Compositions representing the multilayered sounds that make the RCS such a vibrantly animated world of sound. He composed graphical notation creating a symphony of sound in a book to be used for improvisational playing reinterpreting the sound he heard and made into a new form of collaborative expression. 

Gino further collaborated with the pianist Maria Sappho on a project titled "Tonotopy" which combined Gino's drawings of the inorganic and organic sounds emanating from the Mackintosh building, Glasgow School of Art where he was a visiting artist "echoing" the rebirth of The Mac after the devastating fire in 2014.

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