St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace Venue 78 Bishopsgate London EC2N 4AG
29 AUG 2026 2:30pm - 20:30pm Live Music 4:00 pm Sharing & Live Music 6:00 pm
Overview
Sound Strokes (concert excerpt)/ Accord Is a Form of Attention (Exhibition)
Exhibition • Artist Sharing• Live Music
FREE ADMISSION
How do we pay attention to the land, to each other, and to the rhythms that shape our lives?
The exhibition Accord is a Form of Attention brings together visual art and live music from Sound Strokes in a unique interdisciplinary event at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.
The exhibition presents Qiu Yangzi’s recent explorations in alternative photographic processes, featuring a triptych of cameraless photographic scrolls titled "Soil Remembers" alongside Rhythm, a series of intricate chemigrams. Through these highly attentive, material-driven methodologies, Yangzi reveals the subtle traces of time, memory, and natural phenomena. Her work invites viewers into a space of deceleration, prompting a critical re-examination of our relationship with ecology, materiality, and place.
Associates with the exhibition, Wan Xing (guzheng), Eleanor Dunsdon (Celtic harp) and Gregor Black (Bodhran/ Drum) perform few intimate pieces from Sound Strokes exploring the dialogue between Chinese and Scottish traditions. Rather than accompanying the artworks, the music responds to the arts pieces through improvisation, texture and rhythm, creating a shared space where visual art and sound inform one another.
The evening concludes with a conversation between the artists, offering insight into their creative processes and how photography, music and cultural heritage can open new ways of listening, seeing and understanding.
Programme
Exhibition
between 2:30pm–20:30pm
Live Music
4:00pm | Bedouin Tent
Artist sharing & Live Music
6:00pm | Nave
Free ticket booking for Live Music and Artist Sharing is recommended.
Agenda
02:30 PM - 08:30 PM
Exhibition: Accord is a Form of Attention
QIU Yangzi is a London-based visual artist of Chinese descent, specializing in experimental photography. Her work explores the relationship between humans and nature, focusing on the elements—earth, sky, and clouds—to examine themes of connection, time, and belonging. At the heart of Yangzi’s artistic vision is Shanshui, a Chinese concept of landscape that embodies spiritual connection, tranquility, and an ideal beyond the material world. Her work reflects a deep engagement with the intangible and transient nature of time, capturing moments that slip between past and present, permanence and impermanence. Through her lens, landscapes become fluid spaces where time folds, dissolves, and reforms, mirroring the fleeting nature of human experience. Yangzi’s creative process embraces chance and spontaneity, incorporating experimental techniques that challenge traditional photographic boundaries. She reinterprets Shanshui in a contemporary context, weaving her Chinese heritage wit
04:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Live Music: Excerpts from Sound Strokes
Wan Xing, Eleanor Dunsdon, Gregor Black
Wan Xing (guzheng), Eleanor Dunsdon (Scottish harp) and Gregor Black (percussion) perform an intimate music excerpts from Sound Strokes - A Harmonious Blend of Chinese and Scottish Music exploring the dialogue between Chinese and Scottish traditions. Rather than accompanying the artworks, the music responds to them, through improvisation, texture and rhythm—creating a shared space where visual art and sound inform one another.
06:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Live Music: Artist Sharing and Excerpts from Sound Strokes
Wan Xing, Eleanor Dunsdon, Gregor Black
Wan Xing (guzheng), Eleanor Dunsdon (Scottish harp) and Gregor Black (percussion) perform an intimate music excerpts from Sound Strokes - A Harmonious Blend of Chinese and Scottish Music exploring the dialogue between Chinese and Scottish traditions. Rather than accompanying the artworks, the music responds to them, through improvisation, texture and rhythm—creating a shared space where visual art and sound inform one another. The artists will share their creative process and ideas in this session.
Soil Remembers
“Soil remembers the temperature, humidity, and how you treat it. Even though we may damage the earth before, we could still take actions to repair and help to heal the earth”
— Qiu Yangzi
"Soil Remembers" (2023) is a 0.97 * 10 meter soil chromatography camera-less photography scroll on handmade paper accompanied by two gold leaf-gilded frames from the Art Nouveau period. Blending chance with artistic control, the work unveils the uniqueness and inherent uncertainty of the natural world. Created using soil gathered from where I was born, where I have lived, and where I live now, Shantou, Hong Kong, and London, this scroll forms a blended visual story of my personal journey. Following its exhibition in 2024, the original scroll was sadly lost in transit and never recovered.
In 2026, collaborate with three musicians Wan Xing on Guzheng, Gregor Black on percussion, and Eleanor Dunsdon on level harp in "Sound Strokes", I created a new iteration of "Soil Remembers" (2026): three 0.97 * 10 meter soil chromatography scrolls on handmade paper. These works incorporate soil gathered from Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, and Hong Kong, the places where the three collaborating musicians and I are based. One of the scrolls was created specifically as a stage backdrop for the Sound Strokes performances at the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, rewarded as five stars in the Wee Review, Scottish Field and highly recommended show in Fringe Review.
Rhythm
“Rhythm 醉墨淋漓" (2023) is a chemigram camera-less photography series I created to express the feeling of being free. Its process involves in chance concept and the rhythm of body movements.
I been educated to be a good girl when I grow up.
Day by day, stresses, worries, doubts, fears might appear within the frames I set for myself. Care too much on being who others expect me to be instead of being myself.
Take a deep breath.
Feel the body moving rhythm.
I am already free.
Through "Rhythm," I invite viewers to take a moment, breathe deeply, and reconnect with the innate rhythm of their being, discovering the boundless freedom that already resides within.
Unborn
"Unborn" (2023) is a mixed media sculpture I created of integrated wet plate collodion photography with kinetic structure and olfactory sensitivities. It symbolises the cycle of birth and death, raises a thought of the meaning of life and the original quality of all things in nature.
No matter how long or short the life is,
live in the moment.
Ruins
“RUINS” (2024) is an invited collaborative project I participated in organized by London based artist Katrina Stamatopoulos and darkroom technician Carl Randall in the past few months. The raw materials that have been given are the destroyed abandoned negatives which have been soaped in leftover developer chemicals, sinking coffee, robbing tobacco and dust for long. After they been rewashed and dried, these negatives were distributed to various printers and artists who adopt analog photography process to freely interpret. The original project concept was a sporn out of a full-time film developer in a commercial c41 lab react to his workspace and destroying unused negatives besides the official darkroom process which demands precise and rigid control of darkroom printing.
As a result, I created a photobook mix-media installation including a foldable revolving photobook with a twisted metal mesh net and a standing sculpture. By specifically printing on the zoom-out details of the RUINs negatives and join them together, the revolving photobook shows different shape every time when it is opened. Also, it is an interactive piece with viewers and adjusts to the presentation environment. Chance is part of the creation element.
Majority of the harms and suffers caused in RUINs are unreversible, while some of cause might be preventable. Wish for peace and look forward with hopes.
Those Unheard
Set within an ornate 19th-century bronze harp frame, Those Unheard captures a hand pressing into shattered mirror bevels as if plucking the silent strings of time. The work borrows its title from Keats’s romantic assertion that unheard melodies resonate the deepest. By transforming this visual rupture into a conceptual instrument, the piece invites the viewer to listen with their eyes, turning profound stillness into a reverberating chord.
Still-Closing Surface
This work orchestrates a delicate convergence of corporeality and acoustic history within custom-built walnut enclosures. Intimate Polaroid fragments of the artist’s body, bordered in iridescent abalone shell, are suspended beneath handmade bullseye glass and superimposed over two distinct musical epochs. The classical architecture of antique 18th-century scores sharply contrasts with the fluid notation of The Ways of Water, a contemporary composition written specifically for a live trio of harp, zheng, and percussion. Ethereal images of coral and jellyfish drift beneath these modern staves, visually echoing the composer’s handwritten directive that "you are the waves." By collapsing the boundaries between static photographic emulsion and live performance, the artwork transforms its physical surface into a permeable membrane where historical silence meets contemporary resonance.
