Tectonics 2025 Artist Profile
Sylvia Lim
Sylvia Lim is a composer based in London. She enjoys working closely with musicians as well as visual artists and choreographers. Her interests include the materiality of sound, notions of close listening, perception, rawness and instability. She has worked with musicians including Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's Ensemble 10:10, members of the Aurora Orchestra, Prague Quiet Music Collective, Mira Benjamin, EXAUDI, The Hermes Experiment, Rubiks Collective and Ben Smith. Her music has been performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival, CoMA Festival and BEAST FEaST, and broadcast on 麻豆官网首页入口 Radio 3, ABC Classic and KFAI. Sylvia completed her PhD at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she now teaches as a Professor of Composition.
www.sylvialim.co
I was recently struck by a chapter on moss in Jessica J. Lee’s book ‘Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging’. I loved the descriptions of moss as resilient, able to grow in small cracks and tiny spaces. For me this brought up other frames of reference - Ememem’s art of using tiles to cover cracks in public spaces, and the Japanese art of kintsugi, mending broken fragments of pottery with lacquer and gold. I was drawn to the image of a softening, a covering over of cracked spaces. There was something gentle, gracious and powerful about the quietly growing moss, that’s there whether or not we stop to notice.
