The installation encourages visitors to navigate their way around the maze using sound, until they come across the centre where they discover two benches and a compass.

As visitors passed through the many green corridors of the maze, they are tempted to follow the tantalising sound of delicate laughter that disappears around a corner. Only to find as they turn the corner that they are drawn towards a dead end, where they can overhear the fragments of an illicit conversation happening in the near distance.

As they continued on their journey through the maze they encounter other conversations and sounds the gentle call of a songbird in the distance, the seductive rustle of fine silks, or the sound of more serious court business. Slowly the sounds weave together in the visitors’ mind to create a rich tapestry of the other people who have passed through the maze over the centuries and lost themselves in the seductive privacy of its secluded corners. Which ones are real, and which are imagined?

When they finally reach the centre they come across a compass. As they approach it, its dial spins violently until it rests on a particular location and plays the sound found in the maze at that moment – the rustling of a silk dress or perhaps the animated conversation of two people who are lost. The compass then takes the sound that is captured at that moment, locally, and feeds it back into the soundscape, so the present experiences of the maze are woven together with past sounds.

The benches are also sensitized and like the compass they capture the present conversations of visitors resting and combine them with past, generated, sounds to create a rich tapestry of experience.

The whole process of creating the sound work was documented by the BBC as part of their “Tales from the Palaces’ series, which was broadcast on BBC 2 in March 2006.

In December 2000 we were invited to create an installation for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, “Nurture and Desire”, alongside work by Mona Houtum, Chris Ofilli, Tracey Emin and Nick Knight. We created a wooden bench, equipped with rocking legs, allowing people sitting on the bench to rock gently back and forth. As they rock a sound environment is generated that evokes the imaginary life that is lived out on the bench.

Ford of Britain has purchased this original artwork to benefit Breakthrough Breast Cancer and to enable Bench 2 to become a permanent public artwork through a competition to find the most suitable location for it in the UK.