Laura Daly

Laura Daly creates site specific and site related artworks that range significantly in scale. Often rooted in prolonged periods of in-depth research, she uncovers concealed and implied narratives where history, memory, myth and story fuse together. Using a variety of media, including sound, drawings, mapping, video and material objects, her immersive artworks generate a haunted exposition of our surroundings and capture a particular kind of longing (known as saudade in Portuguese and hiraeth in Welsh). She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Winner of The Engine Room International Sound Art Competition and New Contemporaries. MA: Central St Martins, University of the Arts London. BA: The Slade School of Art, University College London.

The Storm Cone is a major immersive artwork by artist Laura Daly, with music composed by Lucy Pankhurst, that considers our intrinsic relationship with the past. At its centre is a journey through music and sound that charts the fading away of a brass band during the interwar years (1918 – 1939). Using new technologies to trace lost bandstands in their final days of mass popularity, we first encounter the band performing as a full ensemble, in 360˚ audio. Breath-taking detail can be heard from every instrument as you move amongst the absent musicians; proximity altering the perception of sounds as Pankhurst’s score builds and then returns to a single note. From the powerful, collective sound of the band, the journey then follows the departed musicians into eight spatial sound works by Daly, where their fragile solo phrases merge and mutate in new environments. History, fiction, artifice and reality combine within this sensory encounter to confront the present with its past.

The Storm Cone was commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection and Metal and originally launched in Peel Park, Salford and Chalkwell Park, Southend in May 2021. In October 2023, in partnership with the Grundy Gallery, it was launched near Central Promenade in Blackpool.

The Storm Cone Writings – a published collection of written responses to

The Storm Cone by Nicholas Blincoe, Jacky Bowring and Jackie Kay

Nicholas Blincoe essay from You Belong Here brochure

You Belong Here – brochure

Review by Natalie Bradbury, Corridor8

The Storm Cone was a Lumen Prize 2024 finalist – Interactive Immersive Award.