And it tastes like hair
Sound & text installation | Translating Ambiance, Melbourne (AU) 2019
Collaboration with Salomé Voegelin
Image by Francesca Oldfield
The work negates the ability to record nature from outside. Instead it wills entanglements in roots and leaves, on moss and air, and by the long grass and the thistle. It insists on our being together and of each other in a co-dependent interbeing, rather than allowing for the separation of being nature or being human.
However, this interbeing is not a becoming plant, becoming wild, becoming other, in a colonial and territorial grasp. Instead it is an acknowledgement of sharing structures and molecules: the invisible traces we are all made of.
The recordings are in the ear, on the hands and feet, and in the mouth, caressing and also slightly unpleasant. They perform textures and rhythms, close up - unintelligible but felt - impressing correspondences and a shared origin, and manifesting what we have in common rather than our difference. To make us feel our skin on their surface. And the recordist stumbles rather than controls the wilderness that she is too. She is where things meet as textures and surfaces, hairy, jagged, wilful and intractable, and definitively alive. Where both nature and human perform their matter together, breaching a dualistic world view and building a different imaginary from the encounter of small hairs, skin, stems and spikes. - - A collaboration with Salomé Voegelin, exhibited at Translating Ambiance exhibition, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Melbourne (AU) 2019. - - Translating Ambiance This exhibition asks: is it possible to translate ambiance between environments, and what are the embodied processes employed during acts of translation? Translated ambiance considers the body and its situatedness, as a site of perceptual difference entwined within an immediate spatial encounter. Each artist has been asked to create a work that considers their own experiences and perceptions while engaged in the process of translating phenomena between environments, using methods and tools particular to their practices. Curator: Jordan Lacey Artists: Polly Stanton/Byron Dean, Bruce Mowson, Camilla Hannan, Michael Graeve, Jordan Lacey / remi freer, Marty Kay, Lisa Hall / Salomé Voegelin, Catherine Clover and Andrew Goodman. Production: Ari Sharp |