People on Air was my response to a commission of a new work for a solo exhibition at the Trondheim Kunstmuseum, in Norway, in 2014. The museum is a large, austere building from 1930, with many rooms of different sizes and all were already assigned to other works when the proposal for a new work came in. I wasn't willing to sacrifice any of them for this new work. I had no idea what it could be except, perhaps, a sound work.

I found the images for sale online and knew instantly that they were my material for this new work. When they arrived in the post I realised that most of them had a cut out paper taped to the back with notes, some typed, some handwritten, some describing the sound being produced and the name of the sound engineer, others had only the name but no other information, and there was no name of the photographer.

The only space available in the museum for the new work was an odd one, long and thin, too wide for it to be a corridor but not quite wide enough to be a room, with an entrance at each end. Knowing that anything on its walls could be viewed starting from either of its two ends I developed a parade of characters, a line, very much like the chorus line of dancers at front of stage in 1950s musicals. I choreographed them.

The last presentation of People On Air was in Berlin at Galerie Thomas Schulte in 2017 and I hadn't needed the print files since then. Now that I needed them or this exhibition, I found them filed in the folder I named 'Sound Works', and this made me smile. There were no sound files at all. But was this a mistake? Did I not hear that boat, that falling body, those thousands of spiders, that thunder?

But, more importantly, didn't you?