Curators William Gruner and Sarah Keighery invited me to present a drawing machine performance work at the opening event for the inaugural Biennale of International Reductive and Non-Objective Art in the Stores Building, North Parramatta on Saturday 19 October 2019. The building is part of a decommissioned prison built in the 19th century and operating into the 21st. The land is now controlled by the Aboriginal Deerubin Land Council, who invited the curators to collaborate on developing this particular building as a space for diverse cultural activities.
I had a small area to work with, so developed a work involving a tripod-mounted drawing machine made with suspended modified drink cans with pens inside. The tins turned to drag the pens through a field of quandong seeds – like rough wooden marbles – and the resulting marks gradually built up into complex circular forms. The sound generated by the clanking tins created a rhythmic quasi-melodic soundscape which was captured by two microphones, a contact mic underneath the wooden platform where the quandongs rolled and another cheap cardioid mic above for the open-air sound.
These two feeds were then filtered through my Koma Feild Kit Effects box and output to a splitter that took the signal to 5 pairs of headphones. Visitors could come over and listen to the altered science-fiction-like sounds, switching between the analogue sound in the space and the heavily treated atmospheric sound under the headphones.
Videophone fragment by Sarah Keighery.
