I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE UNDER MY FEET
Sound/Sculpture installation collaboration with sculpture artist Carly Fischer (carlyfischer.com)
Exhibited at Incinterator Gallery, West Melbourne, Feb-March 2019.
This collaboration sprung from Carly Fischer’s research residency at Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West in Maribynong, Melbourne where she found oral archives from the 1980’s interviewing women who worked in the munitions factories around Melbourne’s West during WW1 and WW2. The interviews detail their personal experiences in terms of the danger and volatility of the work, the poor conditions, their discovery of unionism, feminism and their own personal anecdotes about life during war time in Australia.
The sound installation is a 5 channel work, utilising the formal structure of a 5.1 channel surround system, but deconstructed and expanded. Each channel is a cluster of old speakers, some from wartime Australia. Their unique sounds and timbres add to the material sound of the womens voices from archives whose voices emerge and float around the room via each cluster.
Above is the full stereo broadcast edit of the soundscape. This piece was submitted and successful in application to be included in the 2 week broadcast event ‘Radiophrenia’ (Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Art, Scotland) 2019.
In addition to the women’s voices, synthestized ambient geological and elemental sounds have been designed and sonified. These sounds cross over between military, machinic and volcanic/elemental sounds made using a Moog modular synthesizer. Some field recordings are also included in the soundscape, where effects and sounds interact in space, blurring recognition of any particular sound, space or time.
Carly Fischer’s work is surreal, her surfaces and textures are completely fabricated and re-fabricated. Her work is eerie in a fascinatingly detailed banal non-reality that constantly shapeshifts.
Her installations weave found and fabricated fragments into alternate narratives that suggest a more ambiguous contemporary context. In her installations, a souvenir, an artefact, an advertisement, a song or a piece of roadside trash becomes a point of departure for investigating the broader context that surrounds it. Through sampling, remixing and reconstructing these collected objects and stories into new sculptural and audio propositions, Fischer reflects on contemporary place as a complex mix of facts, fictions and fantasies.