RETURN TO THE GROTTO (2022) is a found object and sound installation work placed in the basement of David Ireland’s house at the 500 Capp Street Foundation. Now functioning as a state-of-the-art office for the Foundation’s staff and archival storage for Ireland’s work, until recently the basement used to be a dirt and mud pit inside the historic Victorian house’s brick foundation. During Ireland’s life, the lightless crawl space was a place he would frequent for many hours at a time: to think, to source inspiration, to excavate dirt as sculptural material, to stage artwork documentation, and to make performative actions and self-portrait photographs. Ireland fondly called this space, “The Grotto.”
The artwork consists of a brown noise playlist transmitted with audio exciters/tactile transducers into a free-hanging bucket of dirt from the Grotto. The vibration of the dirt and bucket is then fed back into an amplifier to produce a rumbling and rattling reminiscent of the sounds of the house above throughout the night, at the busy intersection of Capp and 20th streets. RETURN TO THE GROTTO is a gesture of recalibration, to remember that the presence of the home exists only because of Ireland’s greatest source of influence: the soil and its historic underlying waterway— just as the stewardship of his artwork and legacy is due to the work of the folks whose office now inhabits the Grotto.
This work was developed during a year-long research residency and for a solo exhibition at the 500 Capp Street Foundation in San Francisco’s Mission District. All objects except speakers and microphones were found onsite at 500 Capp Street Foundation.
Documentation courtesy of Sherwin Rio.