Sound projects
I work with environmental recordings, voice, Aeolian harps, analogue circuits and vibration. I sometimes record myself singing, then alter and layer the voice so it becomes part of the environment of the work. I think a lot about how sound occupies space, what shape it is, and how it informs the shape of what I can’t see. Sound moves through my installations, films and sculptural listening works, through materials, places and bodies.
I gather recordings over different durations and sometimes change their speed, bringing frequencies outside human hearing into an audible range. Layering, repetition and altered time allow sounds to become environments, creating ways of experiencing a place that may sit outside our usual range of perception.
Alongside composed soundscapes, I make investigations in listening, receiving and recording. Some begin with questions about what materials might hold in their acoustic forms, shapes and cavities, what we call silence, and what might become perceptible through strange recording experiments.
Everything is Speaking
Soundscapes within installations presented at Elevator ARI, Lismore, in 2023 and Caloundra Regional Gallery in 2024.
Environmental recordings gather with my voice, film, fabric, mistletoe forms and vibration. I sang 1980s breakup songs and reversed them as a small attempt at undoing harm, folding my altered voice into atmospheric recordings.
At Elevator ARI, sound moved through a wheelchair-accessible platform fitted with transducers. At Caloundra, the soundscape accompanied galactic time-lapses moving across walls and ceiling. Bodily time, plant time, fire time and star time could be encountered together.
Explore Everything is Speaking
Forest Telephonists
2023
With Tara Gilbee
Airspace Projects, Marrickville, Sydney.
Sound formed part of this collaborative installation, which brought our encounters with separate environments into a two-screen conversation.
Sound and video were gathered at two sites approximately 1,800 kilometres apart. We slowed both, lowering the sound towards the infrasonic range. The capacity of infrasound to travel long distances informed a speculative exchange: recordings were played at each site, directed towards the other.
The recordings later met in Sydney, approximately halfway between the sites, where the screens faced each other, creating another sort of acoustic meeting point.
Tara and I worked as a kind of message bank for our respective places, gathering impressions and responding to environmental signals. Sound and slow-moving images held these messages, allowing different places, bodies and times to meet without requiring everything to become comprehensible to us. Perhaps some of these messages were for other beings, outside our perception.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you… (Bunya Bone Song)
2023
Soundscape for Ross Annels’s installation, exhibited in Spectra: Contemporary Furniture Design, Artisan, Queensland.
Ross made a steam-bent Bunya and cast silicone stool, alongside prototype Aeolian harps made from Bunya, bamboo, red cedar, harp pins and nylon monofilament.
I composed a thirty-minute soundscape, tentatively titled Bunya Bone Song, from recordings Ross and I gathered on Bunya Country using the harps and digital recorders. The composition imagined something of the sounds a Bunya pine might hear over time. It was played through transducers in the stool and through headphones, allowing sound to be encountered through vibration as well as listening.
Installation image and further details on Ross’s website
Analogue Environmental Sound Synthesiser
2019
With Ross Annels
Floating Land, Lake Cootharaba, Noosa.
A sculptural listening structure that brought environmental and bodily sounds into a shared analogue circuit.
Water movement, wind, birds and surrounding lake activity met bodily rhythms. Visitors leaned towards a carved, shell-like listening device, bringing their bodies into the changing acoustic conditions of the site. The work gathered a temporary relationship between listener, material and place.
Explore the Analogue Environmental Sound Synthesiser
Deep Time Signals
2018–ongoing
Wind moving off Mount Ninderry, behind our home in Queensland, was gathered through Aeolian harps designed and built by Ross Annels. The mountain’s volcanic rocks are more than 200 million years old. The harps translated moving air into vibration, making some of the unseen space around us audible, tangible.
Harp recordings developed alongside full-spectrum pinhole photography, astro time-lapse and bilateral drawing. These processes meet in the film 14 Billion Years Ago Now (2021–2023), bringing different durations and scales into relation.
The soundscape for The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you… also developed within this ongoing field of wind listening.
Bilateral Clay Recordings
2013–2019
These experiments grew through clay, contemplation, feeling, pressure, duration and listening. I approached clay forms as speculative recording devices, wondering what an encounter might leave in matter, and what might later be received from it.
Alongside these material experiments, I attempted to record supposed silence. Listening became a way of approaching something I could not readily identify or account for.
Explore Bilateral Clay Recordings
The Dawn of R.A.M.
2009
Bus Projects, Melbourne.
Sound formed part of this speculative installation, which imagined a future museum assembled by chimpanzees trying to understand a vanished human civilisation.
Found materials became fragments of an uncertain history. The installation held the possibilities and misreadings that might arise when a world is reconstructed from what remains.