An Ear to the Edge of Sound
You cannot play air with hammers, you have to play with butterfly wings...
— Clara Rockmore, musician, 1911-1998.
The ear is a delicate thing. It is under the influence...
— François J, Bonnet (The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipealego), 2016.
That which was lost...│
Laniyuk│2022
Finding forgiveness
Is about hearing hurt within ambivalence
Hearing disorientation between sentences
Learning how to let go
Of what is not yours to own
About not letting hurt become a home
Finding healing
Comes from photos on walls
With smiles from a child
Who took what she could
But deserved so much more
Who still picks at the inside of my heartbeat
Trying to guide me home
Finding growth
Arrives unexpected
Heeding whispered warnings
Folded into an inner knowing
The uncomfortable peace
That comes with growing
Against the grain
Of moving
Past the pain
Of a life lead by empty promises
Built on conditions
And then one day realising
The pattern you inherited
And was made your bed
Has changed
Sound is always coupled with a listening...
I am the Ear of the Listener.
Grace Ferguson (artist)
Grace Ferguson is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and piano educator based at Eastmint Studios in Naarm, Australia. Her practice encompasses a variety of music projects including the presentation of solo art music & ensemble collaborations, as well as composition & sound design for theatre, dance & film. Grace's works often reflect curiosity in the creation & recasting of memories; the process by which they emerge, unfold, layer & interact with the present & environment. Coalescing composed & improvised material, Grace’s live performances draw from her classical training and other historic music traditions; although she often enjoys subverting many of these conventions through an abstract, feminine lens. Grace is represented by Stella Schiftan, Crown Ruler.
Julian Tuna (artist)
Growing up in the bottom-right corner of Australia, Julian photographed his early life on a goat farm. A little odd, visually beautiful with an unassuming human insight, Julian represents a fresh type of narrative in the new Australian landscape, working across narrative, commercial & music video. His films, including Widowers (Palm Springs, Vancouver International, Flickerfest), have screened at festivals internationally & have been featured on Nowness, Rolling Stone, The Shiny List & many more. He is on his 10 millionth draft of his debut feature. Ask him about it if you dare. Julian is based in Naarm & his mum is very proud of him.
Tina Stefanou (artist)
Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist living on unceded Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with & across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours. As a means to seek more inclusive ways of making & to frame tangled relationships, she engages in multispecies performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter. Stefanou has performed & exhibited locally & internationally including: Salt Museum (Istanbul); Kadist Gallery (Paris); Le Pavé d'Orsay (Paris); the University of Music and Performing Arts (Graz); Residency Corazon Gallery (La Plata); The Yellow House (Sydney); The Sydney Opera House; Stacks Projects (Sydney); Carriageworks (Sydney); The Ian Potter Museum (Melbourne); Blindside Gallery (Melbourne); Cementa (Kandos); Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; McClelland Gallery (Langwarrin); Hamer Hall; Australian Centre of Contemporary Art; MONA; Rosi Braidotti Posthuman Artist Labs; Art + Australia website & Collingwood Yards.
Laniyuk (artist)
Laniyuk is a Larrakia, Kungarakan, Gurindji, & French writer and performer of poetry & short memoir. She contributed to the book Colouring the Rainbow: Blak, Queer and Trans Perspectives in 2015, has been published online in Djed Press & the Lifted Brow, as well as in print poetry collections such as UQP’s 2019 Solid Air and 2020 Fire Front. She received Canberra’s Noted Writers Festival’s 2017 Indigenous Writers Residency, Overland’s 2018 Writers Residency & was shortlisted for Overland’s 2018 Nakata-Brophy poetry prize. She runs poetry workshops for festivals, moderates panel discussions, & has given guest lectures at ANU and The University of Melbourne. She is currently completing her first collection of work to be published through Magabala Books.
AM Kanngieser (artist)
AM Kanngieser is a German, first generation Australian sound artist, geographer and writer living in Naarm. They work through listening and attunement to approach the relations between people, place and ecologies, combining oral testimony, poetry, and voice with hyper-detailed soundscapes and fieldrecordings to create immersive installations and radio art pieces. They are the author of Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013) and Between Sound and Silence: Listening towards Environmental Relations (forthcoming). They are a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures and work extensively in collaboration with Pacific storytellers, artists, advocates and grassroots organisers. Their audio work has been commissioned by Documenta 14 Radio, BBC 3, ABC Radio National, The Natural History Museum London, and Deutschland Radio, amongst others. Their radio art piece “And Then The Sea Came Back” was Jury nominated for the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica, and they have been featured in international arts and music publications including The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music, Quietus, Transmediale, Outline and Art Quarterly magazines
Lucreccia Quintanilla (artist)
Dr Lucreccia Quintanilla is concerned with sound & the collective. She is an artist, DJ & writer and educator & has recently completed her Doctoral research titled: Whose Myth? The Echo and the Diaspora, at Monash University. At the core of her ongoing project is sound as a mode of knowledge transference & with this in mind Quintanilla creates written works, sculptural & painting works. In recent years she is interested in the potential of sound & amplification. She has constructed a soundsystem speaker stack in the Jamaican sound system style as a point of departure for thinking about culture, multiplicity, collaboration, joy, resilience, dancing & music/sound experimentation. Quintanilla has presented at the Sound System Outernational Conference in Naples, Italy & the has been a resident artist at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada. Quintanilla is a soundsystem operator of General Feelings Sound.
Katie Stackhouse (artist)
Katie Stackhouse completed a Master of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts, Naarm/Melbourne, in 2021. Her artwork examines notions of time, landscape & contemporary human interaction with specific sites & natural environments. Stackhouse studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy (Netherlands). In 2020, Stackhouse was commissioned by A Published Event to write Granite. She was a recipient of the VCA Access Mentoring Award (2019) & has exhibited in several solo exhibitions & multiple curated group exhibitions & awards including the Woollahra Small Sculpture Award (2018) & Praxis 5, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2019). Stackhouse has completed multiple private commissions & has been the recipient of numerous grants through Regional Arts Australia. She was awarded a residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in the USA. Other residencies include the Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier in the Netherlands & Durrmu Arts Centre in Peppimenarti, Australia. Her work is included in private collections throughout Australia, Europe, Japan & the USA.
Josephine Mead (curator)
Josephine Mead is a visual artist, writer & curator based on Wurundjeri woi-wurrung Country. She works through photography, sculpture, installation & writing to explore personal notions of support. She has exhibited widely, both nationally & internationally. She has undertaken residency programs in Mexico (the Arquetopia Foundation Residency), rural Victoria (the Macfarlane Fund Residency), Turkey (Tasarim Bakkali TAB Residency), Portugal (Córtex Frontal Residency) & Germany (ZK/U Residency through Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik). She was an inaugural Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards (2020-21), was Chair of Artistic Directors for Blindside Gallery (2020-22), is co-founder of Co- Publishing, alongside Christine McFetridge & is one of the founding Artistic Directors of MILK Gallery.