Ivor Fabok: The Aesthetics of Sound

A childhood fascination with a crystal radio first revealed the invisible movement of sound through the air as waves. Years later, hearing improvised modern jazz on late-night radio transformed that curiosity into an enduring engagement with music as a way of understanding structure, rhythm and perception. Since then, listening has become as fundamental to Ivor Fabok’s practice as looking, informing an approach in which painting, collage and sculptural thinking are shaped by the temporal and spatial qualities of sound.

The work emerges from an intuitive dialogue between the local environment, memory, literature and music. Rather than treating these as separate influences, they are understood as interconnected systems that continually overlap and inform one another. The play between two and three-dimensional form, colour and space reflects an ongoing investigation into how visual language might evoke the physical and emotional resonance of sound without attempting to illustrate it. Colour becomes vibration rather than description; structure becomes something experienced as much as seen.

Observing and gathering are integral to Fabok’s practice. Fragments encountered in the landscape—whether physical, visual or atmospheric—are absorbed over time and reappear as relationships of colour, line and form. The work is not concerned with depicting a specific place, but with conveying the accumulated experience of inhabiting one. Memory and direct observation merge, producing compositions that are both grounded and open-ended.

Throughout the practice, the shared methodologies of visual art and experimental music provide a rich field of inquiry. The collage strategies of modernism, the materiality of sound collage, and the openness of avant-garde jazz demonstrate how fragments of everyday experience can be reordered into new relationships. Layering, juxtaposition, repetition and improvisation become common principles through which paintings are assembled, disrupted and reconfigured. The process is less about composition as a fixed arrangement than about remaining responsive to the evolving internal logic of each work.

The music of Morton Feldman has been a particularly enduring influence. His concept of “crippled symmetry” describes structures that resist perfect balance, where subtle shifts and irregularities become expressive in themselves. Feldman’s compositions offer a close analogue to painting, unfolding through duration, variation and attentive looking. They suggest that meaning is found not through resolution but through sustained perception, where order and uncertainty coexist in quiet tension.

Making, like improvisation, is an act of continual negotiation. One builds, dismantles and rebuilds, allowing each decision to prompt the next in a rhythmic process of call and response. The studio becomes a place of attentive listening, where visual decisions accumulate in much the same way that a musician responds to evolving harmonies. The work develops through intuition rather than prescription, trusting that coherence emerges through engagement with the process itself.

This continual cycle of construction and revision reflects a broader understanding of lived experience. We create systems, routines and structures in an effort to establish balance and meaning, yet they are inevitably disrupted by forces both internal and external. Rather than resisting this instability, the work embraces it, recognising uncertainty as a condition of growth and transformation. Each painting records not only decisions made but also those abandoned, revised or rediscovered.

Underlying the practice is the conviction that art is less about resolving experience than remaining open to it. Through an interplay of colour, rhythm, material and form, these works invite a sustained, contemplative encounter in which visual perception begins to echo the qualities of listening. They occupy a space between painting and sculpture, composition and improvisation, order and chance—where the silent language of images resonates with the invisible structures of sound.