fuliguline (2021), a multi-channel moving image response to the living collection of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

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The title fuliguline means “of or pertaining to sea ducks,” though the work itself bears no relation to them. Titles in my practice rarely operate as explanations; instead, they emerge from intuitive, phonetic impulses—how a word feels in the mouth, how it looks when written, how it gestures toward something without naming it. A title must sit right visually and sonically, even if its logic is opaque.

This sensory and visual pull also drives my making. I search for images, forms and textures that carry their own internal language—materials and gestures that offer immediate, embodied responses rather than symbolic meaning. When I applied to the Guildhouse Collections Project to work with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, it was not to illustrate their activities or translate music into imagery. Instead, I was looking for points of correspondence between their world and mine, observing how their systems of practice might intersect with a material-based studio process. With little to no formal musical training, this approach allowed me to witness the orchestra with respect and curiosity, focusing on structure, behaviour and exchange rather than technical reading.

Despite a year marked by COVID restrictions around gatherings and performance, I spent considerable time within the ASO environment. I attended rehearsals unobtrusively, simply listening, watching and absorbing the dynamics of the organisation. It was a privilege to witness the orchestra at such close range. Early on, I began to think of the ASO as a living organism—an ecology composed of musicians, administrators, architecture, audience, instruments and the many unseen forces that support them. A siphonophore became a useful analogy: a colonial marine organism made of specialised, interdependent bodies that function together as a single entity. This image allowed me to understand the orchestra not as a hierarchy but as a fluid, co-responsive system.

Back in the studio, I sought equivalent relationships among the materials I work with. What constitutes a symphony of matter? Which materials harmonise and which resist one another? And what external conditions—gravity, movement, heat, magnetism, pressure, chemical reaction—might activate a group of materials into producing something unexpected? In essence, an orchestra is a gathering of individuals applying breath, friction, tension and impact to inanimate objects in order to produce something beyond definition. I wondered whether a similar sense of emergence could be generated through matter, action and force in a visual and moving-image context.

Silence became one of the most compelling insights from my time with the orchestra. In particular, the moment of collective tuning: when the first violinist stands, and each musician aligns their focus and sound to a single note. The transition that follows—when the room settles into a silence that is full rather than empty—is hypnotic. That charged pause, saturated with expectation and shared attention, became a conceptual anchor.

In the multi-channel installation, each screen carries its own sequence of material experiments. At unscripted intervals, all channels abruptly synchronise, momentarily aligning before diverging again. This synchronisation serves as a visual analogue to the orchestral tuning moment: a brief convergence that produces its own kind of fullness—a shared breath, a perceptual stilling.

The project remains open and accumulative. New studio experiments are added to the timeline over time, and the installation adjusts to each venue, whether as a single projection, a two-channel configuration or an expanded field of multiple screens and monitors. It is a work that continues to evolve, much like the contingent systems that inspired it.