Featured Artist Paulapart Pino

Sculptor Paulapart Pino creates acoustically honed spiral sculptures which affect sounds passed through them. Visit his website to learn more about his work.

 

 

My soul has always been a curious one. I am driven by a desire to explore, to understand, and to create new things in the world. The art I make expands my fascination with the natural world into an investigation about expression, geometry and resonance.

 

 

Painting was my first love, a love I focused on with endless enthusiasm in my youth. Then art school opened my mind to wilder, less restrained forms of artmaking and taught me that art can take any form, that it can leap out from flat canvases into the 3D world we live in, and that as a physical structure, art can affect the space both inside and around it.

 

 

These possibilities, coupled with the opportunity to employ new materials like metal and ceramics, thrilled me to no end, so I changed gears in art school and continued my quest as a sculptor.

 

 

I also grew up writing music and performing with a rock band, a passion that I had put on the back burner until I realized the potential of combining my musical interests with sculpture. Acoustics, the study of how sound and vibration pass through a space, became the new focus of my artistic pursuits. I started making acoustic sculptures.

 

 

First, I explored how different materials reflect or absorb sound differently, e.g. cardboard dampens sound whereas metal can redirect sound efficiently. Once I grasped which materials would be useful for manipulating sound, I began experimenting with various geometries to see how sound would pass through them.

 

 

After a year of searching, I discovered that hollow spirals, shaped like snail or nautilus shells, have an incredible effect on sound. As a sound plays through the long curving tube, the spiral adds expansive reverberance and bass resonance (like a subwoofer with deep echo).

 

 

The acoustic properties of spiraling horns and shells also have deep roots in human history like the shofar in Judaism and conch shells in Hinduism. Spirals are even at the very core of human hearing—the cochlea of our inner ear is a coiled spiral because it improves the range of our low-frequency (bass) hearing.

 

 

Once this came together in both my studio practice and outside research, I committed myself to create spiral shells in every way fathomable and finding new ways to explore their acoustic properties.

 

 

The curving repetition of these acoustic Om shells is a metaphor for my quest to synthesize a love of creativity, science and life into art.

 

 

I often build multi-channel surround sound systems by installing several shells in one room and use them to play the sounds of singing whales with ocean waves.

 

 

Or, I use them as a live sound system to collaborate with musicians who can perform their music through an orchestra of singing shells. My work now is to continuously hone these acoustic sculptures in my studio practice and to share them with the world through sonic installations and musical art performances.

 

Artist Paulapart Pino invites you to follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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