Stella Whalley (Fine Artist) & Toby Bricheno (Composer).
Bad Witches
A film collaboration exploring sound, memory, and viewer perception.
In Bad Witches, Whalley and Bricheno present viewers with a series of short film sequences sourced from various origins, replacing the original soundtracks with their own compositions of music and sound effects. This sonic reimagining builds tension and evokes a range of emotional responses. The film deliberately emphasizes the viewer’s subjective experience, engaging collective memories and personal reactions. In an intriguing reversal, the audience hears only the sound without seeing the images, creating a space where imagination fills in the visual gaps. Bad Witches was exhibited at Empire 11 during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 (www.empire2.info).
London Basin
An interactive, cross-country artistic collaboration between London and Portugal.
London Basin is an interactive collaboration spanning two countries, with Toby Bricheno as artist, director, and composer working from his London studio, and Stella Whalley as visual artist based in Portugal.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s quote—“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away”—the project translates Bricheno’s verbal descriptions of his dreams into large-scale charcoal drawings by Whalley. Working remotely, Bricheno transmits subconscious images via audio over the phone, which Whalley interprets and visualizes, acting like a human television.
Whalley’s process involves continuous layering, rubbing out, and redrawing, capturing the shifting and abstracted nature of dreams as if playing a game of Chinese whispers. This iterative transformation is documented through stop-frame animation, revealing the evolving history of each drawing through the visible traces of erasure and reworking.