Louise Foo | Atlantis Anew
Bricks Gallery is pleased to present Atlantis Anew, a solo exhibition by Louise Foo. Spanning the main gallery, this marks Foo’s debut solo with us and features a range of works including framed cyanotypes on organza silk and paper, embroidery, as well as a sound installation.
”We also have soundhouses, where we practise the healing powers of sound; where we analyze each human being’s innate waveform and induce those harmonics to resonate which have fallen out of sorts… man and beasts are given the means of communication, one to the other, so that man despises not the animal kingdom, nor any other form of life, no, nor even the ’inanimate’, but humbly learns the wisdom derived from contact with another aspect. Here we learn the harmonic series of the elements, the cycle of the years, the oscillation of the tides, and the induced resonances from those forces far out in space.”
- Atlantis Anew, Daphne Oram (1960)
In Atlantis Anew, Louise Foo explores how sound can be reimagined as visual language through a collaboration between the artist, machine, and the alchemy of plants. Inspired by Daphne Oram’s frequent engagement with a passage from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), particularly his vision of “sound-houses,” Foo creates a space where sound transforms into new visual and spatial expressions. Across the works, themes of transformation, vulnerability, healing, and myth unfold - embracing the unexpected and inviting us into a state of material flux.
The exhibition moves across sound, electronics, paper, textiles, and botanical elements. At its core are the archetypal Lissajous curves, familiar from oscilloscopes and mathematical diagrams, which Foo brings into new visual forms. Patterns that are normally rational and controlled now take on a life of their own, shaped by chemistry, weather, pH values, and exposure times. The results are layered, moving works that hover between unpredictability and control.
Several works are made using a custom-built sand-drawing machine, depicting sound in shifting sand patterns. These traces of movement are captured through cyanotype - a light-based photographic process where water and sunlight leave traces on paper. Plant-based dyes are used to soften and alter the deep blue tones, introducing delicate shifts in color.
In her textile works, subtle techniques like shrinking fabric and layering silk allow Foo to translate sound into tactile form - with stitches that ripple like waves and surfaces that recall sound’s fleeting presence, its movement, and disappearance.
The exhibition is accompanied by a sound installation where a living plant generates the harmonies embedded in the visual works. With this experimental approach, Atlantis Anew opens up a space where sound is not only something we hear, but something we can see, feel, and imagine differently - a poetic meeting between technology, biology, and the body.
Louise Foo (b. 1982) is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. She studied Digital Media at the Funen Art Academy (DK) and holds an MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (US). She is the artist behind ’Eleven Movements of the Cryoscape’, a permanent data- and sound-based installation at The Icefjord Centre in Ilulissat, Greenland. Foo has exhibited installations including ’Disharmony of Spheres’ at Nikolaj Kunsthal (2021, DK) and ’Rings of Saturn’ at Planetarium (2022–23, DK) as part of the artist duo FOO/SKOU.
This fall, she will be Artist in Residence at the Niels Bohr Institute, collaborating with astrophysicists on a commission for Kulturværftet in Helsingør.
