PEARLA PIGAO

Pearla Pigao ©

Built with Berta.me

$Fabric, Wire, Voice, Water: Weaving Voices as a Merging of MaterialitiesBy Petteri Enroth If I had to pick one phenomenon from the timeline of contemporary art that has heralded and exemplified the significance of materials for artworks, I would probably point toward textile art. With long and varied histories as something homely, crafty, hobby-like and feminine, it entered the halls of fine art institutions slowly and carefully throughout the 20th century. The fabrics made these halls echo with neglected history, homebound activity, nurture, bodily intimacy, unsung labour, cultural chauvinism, and the unfounded principles of high art. Again, during the 21st century, textile art has grown into one of the biggest trends in contemporary art and is therefore bound to find new paths. As things currently stand in the artworld, this is likely to happen through merging with other materials and media.A rather recent and still quite rare development is combining textiles with sound. Pearla Pigao’s Weaving Voices does this in an original way, one that is useful to contextualize a little.*An intertwinement of textiles and sound is not far-fetched. Just as we are almost constantly in touch with fabrics and fibres, there is no point in our lives that would be completely without sound. In what we think of and live through as everydayness, textiles and sound surround us in an intimate, supportive way. They conduct our atmospheres and mark our senses of place and bodily positioning in similar, often soft and flowing ways – in contrast to other everyday materialities like the asphalt we walk on, the plastic keyboards we slam, or the concrete walls that confine and protect us. Fabric and sound share something in their relation to the body. We notice a cold toe like a cessative noise.Touch and hearing, skin and ear, merge already at the beginning of our lives, in the womb. Once hearing starts to develop at around 18 weeks of pregnancy, the two senses are close to indistinguishable, both mediated by water. They continue to bear similarities later on, when we leave water behind and begin our journey surrounded by air. Hearing someone speak, play an instrument, let alone whisper in our ear is quite literally touching through air, vibrating this mixture of gases between us. Weaving Voices builds on this connection.To do this, the work uses modern technology. Incidentally, technology has also become as much an often-unnoticed part of the quotidian flow of our lives as fabrics and sound. I might be standing at traffic lights, listening to music from wireless headphones surrounded by hybrid-powered cars with a high-voltage power line humming above me while being recorded by a CCTV camera and pierced by radio waves. Technology is, as it were, human-sized in the sense of being omnipresent, low-threshold and easy, and often necessary, to take for granted.Weaving Voices incorporates a sophisticated set of audio technology with hundreds of meters of cable, a modular synthesizer, custom-built electronics, software and such. Listed like this, such a setup might evoke a sense of cold, inhuman modernism. Indeed, when sound art established in the 1970’s, it was often wilfully distant from our everyday concerns and scales, mediating scientific concepts and the estranging potential of sound technology – or, in the field of acoustic ecology, tried to harness this technology to re-create the authentic reality of distant soundscapes, i.e. to use technology so meticulously that it would disappear into itself.This DNA of sound art is present in Weaving Voices, but the work also elaborates on a more recent development within it, one that doesn’t shun the human voice, musicality, and bodily interaction. The work addresses the exhibition space not only as physical, aural or atmospheric but also as social and communal. The way I move in and with the work matters on all these levels. By turning movements into sound, Weaving Voices thematizes the simultaneous materiality, sociality and choreographic nature of the body, emphasized by the performance by four contemporary dancers that has been part of the work since its first exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2025.In short, the work makes the air and our movements in it “tangible”. I move, a voice answers – and not just any voice, but part of a composed whole. I can unearth it from the hanging fabrics and affect it to an extent, but it has a heart, structure and trajectory of its own, and only parts of it become audible at a given moment. As if we could make the air ripple, surge and wave in a way that we usually associate with water, a material that Weaving Voices indeed incorporates. Ripples in water often have to do with moments of earthing solitude, quiet reflection, and coming down from the heights of our speculations and aims. And so, to touch the water of Weaving Voices, we must kneel down, altar-like, as if to summon. I can’t avoid thinking of Narcissus here, too: we can be reflected in this water, but only as sound and through an existing composition, by breaking the surface and bringing forth something other than ourselves.*However, we do also exist as visible reflections within Weaving Voices, only not through mirrors or lenses but as electronically mediated biomorphic forms on a board of LED lights. The element makes me think of a kind of cultural history of giving sound visible forms, for which we seem to have a fascination, even a pressure. This thread runs from the Biblical burning bush to Ernst Chladni’s famous namesake sand boards to modern acoustics with its reverberation patterns, refraction visualisations and equations. This time, the combination of sound and light sequences resembles something of a “close encounter of the third kind” with a version of ourselves that is as much wired and mediated as it is immediately corporal. To me, all these aspects of Weaving Voices come together as a curious tension between things like estrangement and everydayness, composition and spontaneity, movement and choreography, participation and otherness, site-specific materiality and abstraction. This is exemplified by the voices of the composition that are as clearly human as they are technologically structured, equalling the undeniable meshing of fabric with metal.Through these tensions, the work does not dramatize or “reveal” the gulf between the immediate and the mediated, sensible appearances and invisible machinations, but rather lets us approach the difference in many modes. I can be playfully exorcising notes from the hanging weaves and the water’s surface in child-like fascination and then look at the LED wall and become aware of how it is very hard to do anything in the contemporary world without being visually presented and represented in ways I do not mean or even want. Most of all, I tend to think of Weaving Voices as a reminder that what we call “air” and treat as emptiness between things is in fact never empty. Rather, it is a strange, soothing, ever-flowing layer around our planet against the emptiness of space, and is constantly alive with vibration, sound, atmosphere, meaning and, most recently, signal and current.$

Fabric, Wire, Voice, Water: Weaving Voices as a Merging of Materialities
By Petteri Enroth

If I had to pick one phenomenon from the timeline of contemporary art that has heralded and exemplified the significance of materials for artworks, I would probably point toward textile art. With long and varied histories as something homely, crafty, hobby-like and feminine, it entered the halls of fine art institutions slowly and carefully throughout the 20^th century. The fabrics made these halls echo with neglected history, homebound activity, nurture, bodily intimacy, unsung labour, cultural chauvinism, and the unfounded principles of high art.
Again, during the 21^st century, textile art has grown into one of the biggest trends in contemporary art and is therefore bound to find new paths. As things currently stand in the artworld, this is likely to happen through merging with other materials and media.
A rather recent and still quite rare development is combining textiles with sound. Pearla Pigao’s Weaving Voices does this in an original way, one that is useful to contextualize a little.
*
An intertwinement of textiles and sound is not far-fetched. Just as we are almost constantly in touch with fabrics and fibres, there is no point in our lives that would be completely without sound. In what we think of and live through as everydayness, textiles and sound surround us in an intimate, supportive way. They conduct our atmospheres and mark our senses of place and bodily positioning in similar, often soft and flowing ways – in contrast to other everyday materialities like the asphalt we walk on, the plastic keyboards we slam, or the concrete walls that confine and protect us. Fabric and sound share something in their relation to the body. We notice a cold toe like a cessative noise.
Touch and hearing, skin and ear, merge already at the beginning of our lives, in the womb. Once hearing starts to develop at around 18 weeks of pregnancy, the two senses are close to indistinguishable, both mediated by water. They continue to bear similarities later on, when we leave water behind and begin our journey surrounded by air. Hearing someone speak, play an instrument, let alone whisper in our ear is quite literally touching through air, vibrating this mixture of gases between us. Weaving Voices builds on this connection.
To do this, the work uses modern technology. Incidentally, technology has also become as much an often-unnoticed part of the quotidian flow of our lives as fabrics and sound. I might be standing at traffic lights, listening to music from wireless headphones surrounded by hybrid-powered cars with a high-voltage power line humming above me while being recorded by a CCTV camera and pierced by radio waves. Technology is, as it were, human-sized in the sense of being omnipresent, low-threshold and easy, and often necessary, to take for granted.
Weaving Voices incorporates a sophisticated set of audio technology with hundreds of meters of cable, a modular synthesizer, custom-built electronics, software and such. Listed like this, such a setup might evoke a sense of cold, inhuman modernism. Indeed, when sound art established in the 1970’s, it was often wilfully distant from our everyday concerns and scales, mediating scientific concepts and the estranging potential of sound technology – or, in the field of acoustic ecology, tried to harness this technology to re-create the authentic reality of distant soundscapes, i.e. to use technology so meticulously that it would disappear into itself.
This DNA of sound art is present in Weaving Voices, but the work also elaborates on a more recent development within it, one that doesn’t shun the human voice, musicality, and bodily interaction. The work addresses the exhibition space not only as physical, aural or atmospheric but also as social and communal. The way I move in and with the work matters on all these levels. By turning movements into sound, Weaving Voices thematizes the simultaneous materiality, sociality and choreographic nature of the body, emphasized by the performance by four contemporary dancers that has been part of the work since its first exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2025.
In short, the work makes the air and our movements in it “tangible”. I move, a voice answers – and not just any voice, but part of a composed whole. I can unearth it from the hanging fabrics and affect it to an extent, but it has a heart, structure and trajectory of its own, and only parts of it become audible at a given moment.
As if we could make the air ripple, surge and wave in a way that we usually associate with water, a material that Weaving Voices indeed incorporates.
Ripples in water often have to do with moments of earthing solitude, quiet reflection, and coming down from the heights of our speculations and aims. And so, to touch the water of Weaving Voices, we must kneel down, altar-like, as if to summon. I can’t avoid thinking of Narcissus here, too: we can be reflected in this water, but only as sound and through an existing composition, by breaking the surface and bringing forth something other than ourselves.
*
However, we do also exist as visible reflections within Weaving Voices, only not through mirrors or lenses but as electronically mediated biomorphic forms on a board of LED lights.
The element makes me think of a kind of cultural history of giving sound visible forms, for which we seem to have a fascination, even a pressure. This thread runs from the Biblical burning bush to Ernst Chladni’s famous namesake sand boards to modern acoustics with its reverberation patterns, refraction visualisations and equations. This time, the combination of sound and light sequences resembles something of a “close encounter of the third kind” with a version of ourselves that is as much wired and mediated as it is immediately corporal.
To me, all these aspects of Weaving Voices come together as a curious tension between things like estrangement and everydayness, composition and spontaneity, movement and choreography, participation and otherness, site-specific materiality and abstraction. This is exemplified by the voices of the composition that are as clearly human as they are technologically structured, equalling the undeniable meshing of fabric with metal.
Through these tensions, the work does not dramatize or “reveal” the gulf between the immediate and the mediated, sensible appearances and invisible machinations, but rather lets us approach the difference in many modes. I can be playfully exorcising notes from the hanging weaves and the water’s surface in child-like fascination and then look at the LED wall and become aware of how it is very hard to do anything in the contemporary world without being visually presented and represented in ways I do not mean or even want.
Most of all, I tend to think of Weaving Voices as a reminder that what we call “air” and treat as emptiness between things is in fact never empty. Rather, it is a strange, soothing, ever-flowing layer around our planet against the emptiness of space, and is constantly alive with vibration, sound, atmosphere, meaning and, most recently, signal and current.
- 1
  
  Fabric, Wire, Voice, Water: Weaving Voices as a Merging of Materialities
  By Petteri Enroth
  
  If I had to pick one phenomenon from the timeline of contemporary art that has heralded and exemplified the significance of materials for artworks, I would probably point toward textile art. With long and varied histories as something homely, crafty, hobby-like and feminine, it entered the halls of fine art institutions slowly and carefully throughout the 20^th century. The fabrics made these halls echo with neglected history, homebound activity, nurture, bodily intimacy, unsung labour, cultural chauvinism, and the unfounded principles of high art.
  Again, during the 21^st century, textile art has grown into one of the biggest trends in contemporary art and is therefore bound to find new paths. As things currently stand in the artworld, this is likely to happen through merging with other materials and media.
  A rather recent and still quite rare development is combining textiles with sound. Pearla Pigao’s Weaving Voices does this in an original way, one that is useful to contextualize a little.
  *
  An intertwinement of textiles and sound is not far-fetched. Just as we are almost constantly in touch with fabrics and fibres, there is no point in our lives that would be completely without sound. In what we think of and live through as everydayness, textiles and sound surround us in an intimate, supportive way. They conduct our atmospheres and mark our senses of place and bodily positioning in similar, often soft and flowing ways – in contrast to other everyday materialities like the asphalt we walk on, the plastic keyboards we slam, or the concrete walls that confine and protect us. Fabric and sound share something in their relation to the body. We notice a cold toe like a cessative noise.
  Touch and hearing, skin and ear, merge already at the beginning of our lives, in the womb. Once hearing starts to develop at around 18 weeks of pregnancy, the two senses are close to indistinguishable, both mediated by water. They continue to bear similarities later on, when we leave water behind and begin our journey surrounded by air. Hearing someone speak, play an instrument, let alone whisper in our ear is quite literally touching through air, vibrating this mixture of gases between us. Weaving Voices builds on this connection.
  To do this, the work uses modern technology. Incidentally, technology has also become as much an often-unnoticed part of the quotidian flow of our lives as fabrics and sound. I might be standing at traffic lights, listening to music from wireless headphones surrounded by hybrid-powered cars with a high-voltage power line humming above me while being recorded by a CCTV camera and pierced by radio waves. Technology is, as it were, human-sized in the sense of being omnipresent, low-threshold and easy, and often necessary, to take for granted.
  Weaving Voices incorporates a sophisticated set of audio technology with hundreds of meters of cable, a modular synthesizer, custom-built electronics, software and such. Listed like this, such a setup might evoke a sense of cold, inhuman modernism. Indeed, when sound art established in the 1970’s, it was often wilfully distant from our everyday concerns and scales, mediating scientific concepts and the estranging potential of sound technology – or, in the field of acoustic ecology, tried to harness this technology to re-create the authentic reality of distant soundscapes, i.e. to use technology so meticulously that it would disappear into itself.
  This DNA of sound art is present in Weaving Voices, but the work also elaborates on a more recent development within it, one that doesn’t shun the human voice, musicality, and bodily interaction. The work addresses the exhibition space not only as physical, aural or atmospheric but also as social and communal. The way I move in and with the work matters on all these levels. By turning movements into sound, Weaving Voices thematizes the simultaneous materiality, sociality and choreographic nature of the body, emphasized by the performance by four contemporary dancers that has been part of the work since its first exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2025.
  In short, the work makes the air and our movements in it “tangible”. I move, a voice answers – and not just any voice, but part of a composed whole. I can unearth it from the hanging fabrics and affect it to an extent, but it has a heart, structure and trajectory of its own, and only parts of it become audible at a given moment.
  As if we could make the air ripple, surge and wave in a way that we usually associate with water, a material that Weaving Voices indeed incorporates.
  Ripples in water often have to do with moments of earthing solitude, quiet reflection, and coming down from the heights of our speculations and aims. And so, to touch the water of Weaving Voices, we must kneel down, altar-like, as if to summon. I can’t avoid thinking of Narcissus here, too: we can be reflected in this water, but only as sound and through an existing composition, by breaking the surface and bringing forth something other than ourselves.
  *
  However, we do also exist as visible reflections within Weaving Voices, only not through mirrors or lenses but as electronically mediated biomorphic forms on a board of LED lights.
  The element makes me think of a kind of cultural history of giving sound visible forms, for which we seem to have a fascination, even a pressure. This thread runs from the Biblical burning bush to Ernst Chladni’s famous namesake sand boards to modern acoustics with its reverberation patterns, refraction visualisations and equations. This time, the combination of sound and light sequences resembles something of a “close encounter of the third kind” with a version of ourselves that is as much wired and mediated as it is immediately corporal.
  To me, all these aspects of Weaving Voices come together as a curious tension between things like estrangement and everydayness, composition and spontaneity, movement and choreography, participation and otherness, site-specific materiality and abstraction. This is exemplified by the voices of the composition that are as clearly human as they are technologically structured, equalling the undeniable meshing of fabric with metal.
  Through these tensions, the work does not dramatize or “reveal” the gulf between the immediate and the mediated, sensible appearances and invisible machinations, but rather lets us approach the difference in many modes. I can be playfully exorcising notes from the hanging weaves and the water’s surface in child-like fascination and then look at the LED wall and become aware of how it is very hard to do anything in the contemporary world without being visually presented and represented in ways I do not mean or even want.
  Most of all, I tend to think of Weaving Voices as a reminder that what we call “air” and treat as emptiness between things is in fact never empty. Rather, it is a strange, soothing, ever-flowing layer around our planet against the emptiness of space, and is constantly alive with vibration, sound, atmosphere, meaning and, most recently, signal and current.
LP from the work Wave Shaper first presented at Soft gallery in Oslo January 2020. The LP is printed in only 100 copies and is numbered and signed. The release contains two live performances where one is played only on the installation itself by Pearla Pigao and Sigurd Thomassen (page A), page B is a longer improvised concert performance by the musicians Arne Mathisen and Sigurd Thomassen. In addition to the installation, they have added guitar, synth and drum machine.
The record can be purchased at Kunstnerforbundet Oslo, Soft galleri's webshop, Trondheim kunsthall or send an email to pearlapigao@gmail.com.
Note: Only a few copies left.
- 1
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
Waves and Scales

by Line Ulekleiv

Imagine a textile surface that creates sound. Enveloping the space like a billowing tone as you approach — first discreetly, then more insistently. The sound turns, increases and lessens again. It is warm, lively and clear as if emanating from a harpsichord.
Pearla Pigao’s finely attuned and sonorous body of work examines music and sound materialized in digitally designed and thereafter manually woven textiles. There are similarities to be found between the digital design of the textile surface and musical composition, and Pigao, who has a background as a musician, spins sound from the moment. She inflects her textiles with resonant intention, based on knowledge and an ear for sound. Technology and weaving have an alliance, for example through the punch cards that inform the jacquard loom, which revolutionized the weaving industry during the 19th century. Binary structures are part of the logic of weaving, making the loom a precursor of the computer. There is a continual translation and transcription in Pigao’s work, between hand, tradition and digital technology.

Thread as medium, body as catalyst

Copper thread woven into the textile transports sound through a circuit, where the musical composition is created by each spectators’ movement. Metal threads were used in weaving and embroidery in ancient times, as a method of catching light that allows for shimmering, playful surfaces. In Pearla Pigao’s work each thread is a live antenna for interaction. As if by pure magic sound envelopes visitors, who affect the textiles without touching them. Each textile can be thought of as a receptive instrument that extends into the surrounding space, a contact surface directly affected by each audience member’s body. The presence of bodies determines the frequency and character of the sound; each person becomes a field of energy that generates a specific acoustic image. The physically and mechanically triggered composition allows for individual variations, flowing between air-streams and tonal possibilities. Sinus (2O17) was first shown as part of the degree show for the Art and Craft Department at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts. It is a precise piece, where copper thread is woven with cotton into two large textiles hung opposite one another, creating a corridor between them. The colour is a delicately shimmering peach pink, like a sunset. White fringes hang at the end of each textile. Pigao’s piece is inspired by one of the earliest electronic instruments, the theremin, constructed around 192O by the Russian physicist Leon Theremin (1896 –1993). Here, scientific experimentation meets musical demands.
The musician induces air vibrations between two electrodes, without direct physical contact. The vibrating soundscape is commonly referred to as «the music of spheres», expressing early modernity’s link between science and esoteric thinking — one could imagine the theremin as Madame Blavatsky’s chosen soundtrack. With her hyper-sensitive textiles Pigao activates a soundscape similar to the theremin, but with an updated and contemporary resonance. Sound filtered through craft as form and agency.

Soundscapes in motion

The auditory component in Sinus was developed by electronics developer Henrik Waarum, whom Pearla Pigao has collaborated continuously with. The sound can be experienced within a given register, with minimalist undertones. Every once in a while, it takes on the characteristics of a slight howl — but without shrillness. The soundscape triggers a rigid melancholy. A sinus tone, the phenomena referenced in the title of the piece, is a completely unitary tone, in other word sound waves with a frequency exactly matching the sinus curve. In Pigao’s work the auditory, visual and interactive are treated equally. Each mode of expression overlaps with the others, seemingly insistent that the translation from one expression to the other is never fully consummated. The performative lends an extra dimension, by inviting collaborators to act alongside the work. During Pigao’s degree show, musicians (contrabass, violin) improvised alongside Sinus. When the piece was shown in the assembly hall in Design Museum Denmark during CHART 2O18, a rhythmic and meditative dynamic was achieved in a performance with DeLeónCompany. In a choreography were movement generated sound, three dancers played a musical composition through partially improvised gestures. The sonic was physically manifested in gliding movements, musically sensitive and precise. The dancers moved under, behind and in front of the textiles, which were held carefully or used as percussive instruments. Hands were angled towards the surface — gestures stylized like in Egyptian hieroglyphs. As if in a world of shadows, the textiles sometimes hid the dancers as they moved between laying on the floor and standing. An atmospheric wave in the room was concentrated in the ripples of the textile surface.

Modes to Moods

Pearla Pigao’s exhibtion Modes to Moods at Atelier Nord invites a more experimental soundscape, more synthesizer-like than previous projects. It also emphasizes her interest for the visual. Here, she shows textile sculptures where lights are integrated in the frame, activating the reflective properties of steel and copper threads. As in her previous project, Sinus, technology and craft provide the foundation. The mood scales that the work references, explore different states of mind, how they occur and how they are expressed. The combination of light and sound is based on modes, a collection of scales closely aligned with each other that share the same seven tones. By varying the base tone, the placement of whole and half steps is «displaced», giving each scale a distinct sound. Such scales were the basis for religious music in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and are important in many folk music traditions. In Modes to Moods, Pigao makes use of scales together with frequencies and filters patched together through a modular synth, as the
basis for the exhibition’s soundscape.
Pigao’s work allows for interaction and auditory undercurrents, as the sound is affected by people moving in the exhibition space. Several people need to be present for the volume to increase, and for the light to intensify. Participation also includes the sculptures, veritable instruments played by bodily difference and distance. The scales are pre-programmed, but the sensory involvement of the spectator makes the whole thing ripple. A scintillating feeling upheld by structure, like a crest of foam — complex, yet simultaneously accessible.