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, moving image, scent, vibration, and multispecies relation, it follows how meaning moves across bodies, environments, and time.

Our bodies are a quilted convergence. Our biomes are collectives of microbial flora, fauna, climates, patterns, tides, winds, bacteria, fungi, electricity, currents and more. Bioelectrical messages chat between us. Sensory information weaves us together. We are completely interdependent beings, yet within the powerful haste of this culture it can be difficult to tend to, and re-pair, these entwined relationships.

This project emerged from a shift in how I understood my own 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 grew from that recognition. The work became a regulatory space for my senses, a place where my body could re-pair itself within local patterns and shared rhythms, and where sensitivity could open outward toward ecological and material relations rather than closing inward under pressure.

The project is led by Australian native mistletoe as both material and teacher. For over 236 years mistletoe has mostly been misunderstood, and many attempts have been made to eradicate it, but thankfully it persists. It has lived here since Gondwanan times, with fossils dating back 31 million years. With more than 97 species, and more still being re-identified, it is recognised as a keystone plant and a builder of ecosystems and communities. It has even been grafted into introduced plane trees in Naarm to improve biodiversity. It holds places together, mends soil, hosts a multitude of species, and creates corridors of life. It repairs, re-whorlds and entangles, while also being almost completely dependent on its host for life. It teaches that we are not separate entities. We are interdependent, and this strengthens us.

Everything is Speaking is a multi-modal investigation into the ways of symbiosis and a hopeful pathway toward the Symbiocene. It is a mistletoe-led, mistletoe-instigated inquiry into the interwoven sensory and biological information constantly moving through and within us. Across its iterations, the work has taken the form of immersive environments where film moves across walls and ceilings, fabric prints shelter and hold space, carved mistletoe haustoria act as symbolic and material presences, and environmental recordings gather with human voice, scent, shadow, vibration, and firelight.

Two major immersive installations were developed through this body of work.

The first, presented at Elevator ARI in Lismore in 2023, centred on a wheelchair-accessible vibrating platform fitted with transducers, where sound moved through the body as vibration. At its centre, carved mistletoe haustoria shaped into keystones emitted the soft glow of a campfire, conjuring a place for reflection. Scent collected from forest resin was dispersed through atomisers and mist. Film, shadow, vibration and fabric prints enveloped the space, creating a sheltering environment for sustained attention and sensory re-tuning.

The second major iteration, presented at Caloundra Regional Gallery in 2024, expanded the work into a broader moving image installation. Galactic time-lapses flowed across walls and ceiling into fabrics printed with drawings, mistletoe wood grains, and forest campfires. Environmental recordings were overlaid with my voice singing 1980s breakup songs in reverse, holding a small spell of hope inside patterns of heartache and hyper-individualism. Carved mistletoe haustoria became a simulacrum of their environmental role, arranged as stones around a symbolic fire, their surfaces carrying long-exposure forest imagery. This installation opened a space for deep imagining and reflection, where care circulated as pattern and atmosphere.

Across these forms, Everything is Speaking does not set out to explain interdependence so much as to stage the conditions in which it can be felt. It holds perception as ecological, shared, and more-than-human. It invites the body into a space where dependence does not mean collapse, and where relation can be sensed as structure, rhythm, and repair.

This work is also a reminder that we are temporal arrangements of symbiotic and endosymbiotic structures, and that each of those communities carries a memory of care and co-operation for their, and our, continued survival.

This work was made predominantly on Kabi Kabi Country, and also on the Countries and lands of Jinibara, Wakka Wakka, Yugembah and Bundjalung peoples.