My Name From Your Mouth 2016
Harmonica, Brass, Found Wood
My Name From Your Mouth celebrates the notes which you speak to someone - one's love for another.
It echoes the Mexican Pyramid of the Sun which is believed to be the first place of emergence - where one's love for another is born.
The mouth organ's breath exhales a song, like hearing your name for the first time. Every time.
That sound is revered. Cherished. Desired. Craved.
That single song balances on a pedestal.
Photograph: Romello Pereira
The Music of Colour 2018
Acrylic paint on maple
The Music of Colour is a homage to Mexico. Blurring the boundary between painting, sculpture and sound, coloured drum shells encapsulate startling shades and sounds. Pink bougainvillea flowers, street markets with songs of food vendors, religious icons alongside protests. Sound within which you live at the point of tears. Beauty you feel as if a defibrillator's fastened to your eyes, a drum kit inside your soul.
Photograph: Romello Pereira
The Butcher's Dance, 2021
Sail cloth, steel and repurposed drift wood from the original Elizabeth Bay Marina
This sculpture of dance moves to the coloured score created by wind. The Butcher's Dance is a song from my series of performance instruments. The sculpture is given its form by the transience of nature and captures the energetic movement of air.
This piece of music warms up, and warms down by dancing. It takes serious pleasure in an intimate movement in architecture, decoration, colour and sound.
Photograph: Romello Pereira
Photograph: Romello Pereira
Songs and Souls celebrates that which is known, but indescribable.
Language struggles to represent our profound experiences in the transcendental and in music. The nature of art can be described through language but intuitive understanding cannot be explained, rather it is intrinsic, known without learning, without being told.
Our entire brain, the neural network, lights up when we listen to music, we listen to music with our muscles… we feel the music, both physically and emotionally. The heart is the site of our understanding.
In Songs and Souls the objects that celebrate these experiences, the candles lit for an icon and the musical icon itself are intertwined, knotted together.
‘Tinnitus’, 2006.
performance sculpture :brass, leather, hardware
Documentation of an action. Single-channel digital video; 4:3, colour, sound
1 minute, 45 seconds.
Harvard University, Cambridge MA
A one-day symposium in association with the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, and the Harvard Australian Studies Committee.
21 April 2012: This symposium will present critical perspectives on the now-widespread interaction of art and rock’n’roll. Artists, curators, critics, and art historians will consider the proposition, made by music historian Bernard Gendron, that rock ‘decisively won over’ the artistic avant-garde in the 1970s. Have distinctive artistic practices emerged as a result, or are we simply witnessing one more episode in the rolling dialogue between art and mass culture? Speakers will also consider the challenge put forward by cultural critic Lawrence Grossberg: that popular music must ‘force the most radical demands of interdisciplinarity onto the agenda.’ Has the art’s embrace of rock’n’roll prompted any such reflection?
Keynote speaker:
Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop culture’s addiction to its own past; Rip it up and start again: post-punk 1978–1984 and The Sex Revolts: gender, rebellion and rock’n’roll. Described as ‘elegant and urgent’ (New York Times), Retromania explores the current wave of revivalism in art and music, and the condition of hyper-stasis: ‘a restless shuttling back and forth within a grid-space of influences and sources, striving frenetically to locate exit routes to the beyond’.