Everything is Speaking

2019–ongoing

Everything is Speaking is an ongoing body of work attending to perception as a shared ecological field. Through sound, material, light, and multispecies relation, the work follows how meaning moves across bodies, environments, and time.

This work emerged from a shift in how I understand perception. After years of living with sensory overwhelm and a nervous system that no longer filtered the world in predictable ways, I came to recognise that what I had experienced as overload was also a form of intensified listening. My body was sensing many things at once.

Everything is Speaking grows from that recognition. It extends an investigation of perception beyond the human nervous system and into ecological, multispecies, and material relations. Sensitivity that once gathered inward opens toward shared biological and environmental systems.

The project is led by mistletoe as both material and teacher. Australian native mistletoe are keystone species. They live through entanglement, forming haustoria that interweave with host trees, exchanging water, minerals, and sugars. Dependency appears here as structure. Working with mistletoe made interdependence tangible, something that could be felt rather than inferred.

Two major immersive installations of Everything is Speaking were developed, first in Lismore and later in Caloundra. These environments combined vibrational sound, carved mistletoe forms, printed wool and silk, light, shadow, suspended structures, and slow-moving audio fields of fire, forest, and human voice. The works established a field rather than a narrative.

In Lismore, carved mistletoe haustoria shaped into stones were placed on an oval vibrating floor that functioned as a sensory hearth. Sound moved through the body as vibration. A fog-producing wooden vessel sat at the centre, held between cauldron and well. Large printed blankets formed a sheltering perimeter, carrying layered sensorimotor drawings and mistletoe grain imagery. Scent from bunya resin, shadow, vibration, and fabric gathered the space into sustained attention.

In Caloundra, carved mistletoe haustoria formed a suspended stone circle. Projections of nocturnal forest campfires and astrotimelapses of thirteen dark moons moved across walls, ceiling, and bodies. Environmental recordings were overlaid with the artist singing 1980s breakup songs in reverse. Care circulated as pattern rather than exchange, a small spell held open against isolation and heartache.

The work operates as a sensory proposition. The space functions as a form of co-regulation, held by overlapping environmental patterns unfolding across different time scales. It asks how perception might become a site of relation. What it means to listen with the whole body. To feel dependence without collapse. To experience shelter without enclosure.

The title Everything is Speaking names a condition. Meaning does not arrive from a single source or hierarchy. Sound moves through floors. Light moves through water. Plant form moves through human gesture. The work attends to resonance rather than message.

This project also holds the difficulty of allowing care to circulate after long periods of unreliability, violence, and withdrawal. Dependence and longing often coexist with caution. Mistletoe offered a way to stay with mutual reliance as a living structure.

Within the broader arc of my practice, Everything is Speaking marks a shift from internal sensory density toward a shared ecological field. The methods remain slow, layered, and nonlinear. The orientation moves toward relation.

The work establishes conditions rather than resolution. It invites the body to sense interdependence without requiring explanation.

This work was made predominantly on Kabi Kabi Country, and also on the lands of Jinabara, Wakka Wakka, Yugembah, and Bundjalung peoples. With deep gratitude to Ross Annels for material skill, philosophical encouragement, and steadfast care.