Night Tone: Clare Qualmann, Saba Zavarei and Claire Hind

A night time headlight lit journey along Cornwall’s unforgiving sunken stone walled lanes following cues and memorised directions for a dont-trust-the-satnav destination. Arrived in a puddled carpark, engine silenced and lights out. Kestle Barton, we hoped...

What follows are some thoughts and impressions from joining a small group of artists and scholars for an, experimental work in progress performance by Clare Qualmann, Saba Zavarei and Claire Hind towards the end of their residency at Kestle Barton in Cornwall, February 2025.  Pics from a walk on the Lizard.

Night sight slowly returning we stumbled towards a silhouetted tree and a yard door. It opened. I could see into a kitchen window. People were gathered around a kitchen table.  Holding my breath I knocked on the door, half expecting to come across a family holiday dinner. But the hubbub greeted me and I breathed. We were welcomed and tumbled into a melee of coats off and undoing boots, sharing stories of connection and arrival. Contrary to the visual expectation of cold kitchen flagstones, our toes basked in the delight of underfloor heating.

We had found Kestle Barton.

We were already experiencing Night Tone.

In that warm and sweet smelling kitchen, big pots on the cooker and piles of leaves on the worksurfaces Clare Qualmann opened with words gleaned from the night. The letters forming the words NIGHT TONE were constructed out of bay leaves on the table, in one of those moments when my mind goes totally blank she invited us to offer a word resonating with the night. Out of the silence someone offered ‘star’ and we were off the participatory hook and it began. Clare swept up the leaf letters and put them in one of the pots on the stove and as she talked began to construct STAR in bay leaves, upside down, ‘the curves are the hardest’ she said. New words were offered and more leaf letters put into the pot of boiling water. The smell of bay permeated the room and as we moved with Clare to other leaf letter constructions, the scent drifted with us. I lost myself in a reverie of the house where I had grown up and where the same steamy smell of bay would drift from the kitchen on Boxing Day when my mother would cook a ham.

Clare made words with plants and talked about her process. Words made with bracken fronds, brittle, delicate, fragile. The dried leaf filigree spelt out both in positive and in negative. Where the fronds formed an outline of a word that you could only just make out it seemed to fizz and move: fragile in meaning and material. She invited us to contribute and I drifted back to find a word for my mum in the kitchen. A powerful and gentle opener for a dreamy evening.

Claire Hind, dressed like Tenniel’s Alice in a shimmering dark green dress filled by white petticoats, invited us to join her in a small darkened room beside the firelit lounge. Slow sounds/music brought us into the room, the scent of the bay became part of the ambience and the chatter subsided. The cave-like space glowed with projected images from the residency. At first we seemed too big and too many but like Alice we squeezed in and the room accommodated us.

Claire moved in the shadow close up against the wall beside projected images of her in the same dress mirroring and merging with stone. Above Claire’s head there was a small grill letting in light from the outside, her slow movement a gesture towards eternity enmeshed in rock. The slide show became a loop of two images, one abstracted and one of Claire’s body enveloping a large rock on the shore. The colour of the dress, the ripples and folds made by the fabric and her body resonating with and amplifying those of the stone. She read from the house visitors book riffing from previous comments and reports into a longer story from their shared residency. An encounter with Eric out clearing the fields; he polishes his car and cuts his lawn. Eric, we learned, is a shaman. This beautiful spoken piece starting in the well-worn phrases of airbnb visitors and seamlessly drifted through found and imagined stories and spectres of the residency at Kestle Barton.

Claire reached up to the small grill to end the spell and we returned to the fire lit room and the next stage of our night journey.

We gathered in front of the fire, but our attention was turned to look outside, behind us. Looking out the old window into the night I was again reminded of the lost home of my childhood.

I could see the stars and the moon, Orion just revealed from behind the clouds. Saba Zavarei moved out of the darkness and into the space, her face just lit by a torch from inside. We pressed up close to the window as Saba moved on the dark grass in the moon and star light. She held large white stones in the palm of her hands, reaching up with them and drawing down. Long strong slow movement stretching to the sky, the white stones became stars plucked from the sky, I imagined them placed in the same configuration as the constellation. The shape completed, she stepped towards us and began singing in a language I did not understand but sounded to my Western European ears as if from the Middle East. A song about land and solidarity and connection, diaspora and return, I thought it was Palestinian. Looking out from the warm firelit room through the small window panes into the dark night, the movement and song lingered in the space. Saba had disappeared into the darkness. An emotional pause held our applause, the silence broken by an insistent banging on the door.

The knock on the door of return, the request for assistance, asylum, welcome? Who were we as hearers of that demand for entry in the night? Saba returned and joined us in the room with the fire to our applause. The song was from Saba’s home, Iran; she shared a story of exile and resistance.

Finally the three artists gave us a script for a walk into the night from Kestle Barton. In the fire flickering darkness Claire, Clare and Saba read us cues and located provocations for a walk along the shore of Frenchman’s Creek as dusk turns to night. A sound walk for voices growing out of their residency to be left as a new layer of memory and presence. A wonderful, calming, integrating close to the performance.

..and then we ate together at the table by the fire, vegetable stew and lentils from Iran. It felt like we talked until late and maybe the dawn was rising as we left. Time slips at night.