Adelaide Festival Centre, May 2021
6 - channel display at The Crease, UniSA, Adelaide
8 channel version shown as a part of ‘Bilge’, 2023
Harts Mill, Port Adelaide
Curated by Tony Kearney
fuliguline (2021), a multi-channel moving image response to the living collection of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
This project is the result of The Guildhouse Collections Project with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Online catalogue and further information here
fuliguline. The title for this work means ‘of or pertaining to sea ducks’. As beautiful and unusual as some of these creatures may be, this project has nothing to do with sea ducks. Titles for me are more about intuitive responses that serve no logic, about phonetics and how the sounds might roll around in your mouth and be suggestive of things or phenomena. Titles to my work do not help to explain, but they do need to look right in a hand-written or typed form
It is this visual and sensory impulse that drives the way I work. I search out images, forms, textures etc. that offer up direct sensory experiences within a language of their own making.
When I first applied to Guildhouse to be a part of their Collections Project with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, I did so with the intention not of documenting their activities or producing work specifically about the ASO, but rather with the intention of finding visual correspondences between my studio practice and what I observed at the ASO. As someone who has little to no music education or understanding, I thought of this as a respectful and productive framework to observe the activities of the ASO in relation to a material-based, visual arts practice.
While not the most advantageous year to be involved in such a project, with many restrictions in place around public gatherings and performance, I did, however, manage to engage with the workings of the ASO on many occasions. This was done largely by sitting in unobtrusively on rehearsals and simply listening and observing. Needless to say, it was an absolute privilege to be able to experience the workings of the orchestra within such an intimate environment.
My initial observations were centred around thinking of the greater ASO organisation in terms of a living organism. Observing it through this lens allowed me to reflect on the interactions and outputs of musicians, management, administration, architecture, audience etc. as something very lively, supportive and interdependent. Using the analogy of a Siphonophore, (a type of sea creature akin to a jellyfish yet actually a co-dependent colonial organism), I tried to gain a sense of the ASO not as a rigid hierarchy of separate roles, but rather as a far more organic and dynamic body of individual and co-dependent phenomena.
When it came to making work in the studio in response to these observations of the ASO, I would look for similar analogies within the world of materials and actions that I had set up there. For instance, what might a symphony of materials consist of, a family of specific and complimentary matter. What groups of materials correspond well together and which groups don’t. Then there was the question of what conditions would be imposed on these sets of materials that might affect them to produce something special (gravity, movement, wind, magnetism, heat, chemical reaction etc.). On some level an orchestra consists basically of a bunch of people plucking, blowing, sliding and banging on strange looking inanimate objects and as a result producing something (sound in this case) quite magical and beyond definition. Could a material-based practice that brings together various materials/matter in combination with certain actions or forces, bring about an equivalent sense of magic within a visual, moving image realm? That was part of my attempt with this project.
One of the key observations that came up during my time with the ASO, apart from the deeply affective and sensory appeal of symphonic sound, was the idea of silence and of synchronisation. The moment in a performance or a rehearsal when the first violinist stands up and the orchestra members shift their attention from the idiosyncrasies and chatter of their own instruments (and their own personalities perhaps), and tune their attention and instrument sound to the same note. There is something quite hypnotic about the moment of silence that follows this synchronisation. It’s a silence that is full, not empty. The sense of expectation and the shift in focus that occurs during this passage of time is one of the most powerful moments in a performance for me, transformative, supernatural almost.
One of the key observations that came up during my time with the ASO, apart from the deeply affective and sensory appeal of symphonic sound, was the idea of silence and of synchronisation. The moment in a performance or a rehearsal when the first violinist stands up and the orchestra members shift their attention from the idiosyncrasies and chatter of their own instruments (and their own personalities perhaps), and tune their attention and instrument sound to the same note. There is something quite hypnotic about the moment of silence that follows this synchronisation. It’s a silence that is full, not empty. The sense of expectation and the shift in focus that occurs during this passage of time is one of the most powerful moments in a performance for me, transformative, supernatural almost.
For the multi-channel installation, multiple screens are each showing different footage. Without warning, and at unspecified moments throughout the footage, all of the individual tracks/screens synchronise to the same footage for a few brief moments, finding a visual analogue to the orchestral moment of synchronisation/tuning mentioned before, and delivering a silence that is full.
This work is seen as an ongoing and adaptive project. The footage shown is accumulative and as time goes by, new material experiments in the studio fold themselves into the timeline footage. The presentation format also changes according to the venue. Either as a single, 2 channel or 20+ channel work comprising multiple projectors and TVs for gallery and other public venues.
