Hearing Your Place: Australian Sound Design Project, Yarra Sculpture Space  2003

Mixed media: Sound of wind in casuarina, footsteps on quartz grave beds, casuarina fronds, marble book, desk & seat

Dim variable

Tabula Rasa   2003

Hearing Place: Yarra Sculpture Gallery Mar 12 – 29

Curated by Dr Ros Bandt for the Australian Sound Design Project

 

This installation is a segment from a body of work I have been developing over the past five years in the Murray Mallee region of Northern Victoria as well as Lake Mungo in South Western New South Wales.  My work is about Land, Memory and Place.

 

I have made an intimate space created by an arc of Casuarina fronds suspended from the ceiling.  This space houses a small wooden school desk with the ochre stained word “Listen” inscribed into its lid. The public is invited to walk in on a bed of quartz gravel, the traditional early settler material used to cover grave beds and which has its own particular sound.

 

Through headphones connected via the ink well the haunting voice of the wind in the Casuarina christata (Belah), indigenous to the Mallee region, accompanied by ghostly footsteps on forgotten graves, speak of ancient memories from that place.

 

A partly submerged blank marble book, the kind which can be seen on European graves appears to have been washed up amidst a bank of river pebbles. There is no text, only the bloodstain of colonial memory: a reminder of the past and an invitation to begin anew.