Mouthing Love: Dulwich Picture Gallery x Touching Bass

PROJECT:  Mouthing Love — A Sonic Response to Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons

CLIENT: Dulwich Picture Gallery

COLLABORATORS: Touching Bass

YEAR: 2025

Dulwich Picture Gallery brought three South London musicians together to create musical responses to Rachel Jones’ Gated Canyons, creating a meeting point between contemporary painting, sound and a local creative community. The project raised a question around how strategic artistic commissions and partnerships can link a brand or institution to a wider community. Because the work involved a series of translations — between painting and sound, between the artists, and between the Gallery and a younger local creative audience — Aetia approached the film as a device for capturing those translations in action.

In conversation with the musicians, we explored how they entered Jones’ work through scale, rhythm, landscape, colour and movement, using their responses to invite audiences to engage themselves with their own process of relating and interpretation. The film mirrored the artists with the paintings that inspired them, cut with clips from performance and conversation to build a picture of the creative process from end to end rather than simply documenting an event. The resulting film, Mouthing Love, was published by the Gallery as a record of the project, and to promote the release of the music produced, a limited-edition vinyl release entitled Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons — A Sonic Response. 

This project made us think more broadly about the difference in resonance between storytelling that simply portrays a subject – whether an artwork or a product – and asks the audience to be inherently invested in it, versus storytelling that portrays a thoughtful engagement with or interpretation of that subject that the audience can consider, follow, and connect to.