IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Nine people stand behind a glass railing, eyes closed. A couple have tilted their faces upwards, including a man holding a white cane. Others have bowed their heads, resting on their forearms or clasped hands. Left to right: Devon Bella, Director, KADIST*; Georgina Kleege, Department of English, UC Berkeley; Chris Downey, architect; Robin Clark, Director of the Artist Initiative, SFMOMA*; Fayen d’Evie, artist; Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections, SFMOMA*; Megan Brian, Interim Director of Education and Public Practice, SFMOMA; Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, SFMOMA; and Martina Haidvogl, Associate Media Conservator, SFMOMA*. Photograph by SFMOMA photographer, Don Ross. *Positions held at the time of the encounter.

RELEVANCE: This image demonstrates the small workshop method that I developed at SFMOMA, which I propose to use to generate the descriptive texts for the Newcastle Art Gallery sculptural commission. On 19 July 2017, a day when SFMOMA’s galleries were closed to the public, I led a small group of museum staff and invited guests through a processional encounter with Sonic Shadows (2010) by Bill Fontana. The image documents a moment of listening, as the group followed an ascending score that I had proposed to guide the encounter, which I had developed based on on echolocation exercises that train attention towards the quietest sounds. I asked those gathered in the atrium to listen for the loudest sound, to tune into its shape and intensity, then put that sound aside and listen for the next loudest, and so on, and so on, until finally they were listening to the quietest sound of all. This process was repeated over five levels, rising from the atrium floor to the fifth-floor oculus bridge. After each listening meditation, I passed around an audio field recorder, and invited the group to describe sounds they had heard. The cumulative, polyphonic recording can be heard at https://relocatingechoes.space/sonic-shadows.

ITEM DESCRIPTION: Ascending/Descending Sonic Shadows (2019) is an artist book that I created in collaboration with printer Trent Walter. The book experiments with print as a medium to translate an embodied score into a tactile and kinaesthetic reading encounter. Where the ascending score that I developed for SFMOMA trained attentiveness towards the quietest sound, the book invites readers to feel for the quietest shifts in texture and composition across a page. The book alternates between debossed and printed spreads. Each spread translates a digital photograph (taken by Don Ross, who documented the ascending encounter) into screenprint form. Ascending / Descending Sonic Shadows is thus an archival proposition to conserve sensorial memories of a specific installation and experience of Fontana’s work. Conservation here is not the elusive goal of maintaining an object in its original form, but a more open quest: carrying forwards memories of encounters with artworks, through corollaries, translations, re-descriptions, and discursive echoes. Note that the book also explores the potential for tactile reading to open pathways for trans-sensory conversation, including between blind and Deaf audiences.

RELEVANCE: This image shows one of the debossed spreads, made by translating photographic documentation into a succession of screenprinting films, which were used to expose photopolymer plates that were relief printed to create tactile indentations. This image is offered as an example of my previous experience with experimental publishing and tactile aesthetics. For more detail, I have co-authored a chapter discussing the creation of this work, accessible at the following link:
“Ascending/Descending Sonic Shadows: Prologue + Tactile Reading Notes + Epilogue.” Co-authored with Elizabeth Boon. Art Writing in Crisis, Ed. Megan Patty and Brad Haylock. Berlin: Sternberg, 2021.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Photographic documentation of my participatory performance 'Tactile Dialogues [Shared Action]' 2016, which I enacted in Moscow, alongside Deaf Blind poet Irina Povolotskaya, as part of the exhibition Human Commonalities, V.A.C. and the State Museum of Vadim Sidur. This image shows three people - a local artist, one of the V.A.C. staff, and the Australian ambassador to Russia - leaning in to feel the undulations of avant garde artist Vadim Sidur’s Structure #1.

RELEVANCE: Provides an example of my past works that have invited audiences to encounter artworks through tactile and other sensorial scores. For more detail, I have written about this performance in a journal article, accessible at the following link:
“Orienting Through Blindness: Blundering, Be-Holding and Wayfinding as Artistic and Curatorial Methods,” Performance Paradigm, Issue 13, 2017. For example:

“We started with attentiveness to the present moment, and sensing the air shift as we moved our feet up and down, an adaptation to fend off the bitter cold. We arranged our bodies as a dialogue circle, one behind another. Treating the back of the person in front as a canvas, through touch alone, we each described what had attracted or compelled us to the encounter and our first impressions of the place. Simultaneously drawing and being drawn upon, we paid attention to the sensations of speaking through touch, and the sensations of embodied listening. We noticed pressure and resistance, and the vibrations of conversation. With Povolotskaya leading, we formed a chain of contact and began to map the space around Structure #1, experimenting with angles of approach. The size of the monument created heat differentials, which Povolotskaya navigated to move closer to the surface of the artwork, and to trace the perimeter of the monument. We paused from time to time to form dialogue circles, to develop narratives through touch, evolve tactile vocabularies, and to calibrate the movement dynamics of conversation. We reflected on how the people and objects in that space had shifted and rearranged over the lifetime of the work, as well as what is valued, what matters. We surrounded the work, ran our hands over the scrapes, the cracks and the patches of smoothness, feeling for textural expanses and discontinuities. I asked people to think beyond the reach of their body, to lean into the work, to sink into its hollows. When we stepped back from Sidur’s Structure #1, our final tactile dialogues centred on what we would take away, and what would be left behind, once we shifted our attention elsewhere…”

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A staff member of SAMSTAG Museum of Art, Anna Zagala, holds a tactile acrylic print, her thumbs touching a shape that correlates with gestural typography in a framed screenprint installed on the wall in front of her. The gestural typography on the screenprint and the tactile print are translations of the phrase “Care is a cognate to grief.” The typography is a stylised version of my orthographic translation of Deaf dancer Anna Seymour signing this phrase in Auslan-based gestural poetics. The screenprint was a collaboration with printer Trent Walter; the typography was a collaboration with Vincent Chan.

RELEVANCE: This image is documentation from my exhibition Endnote: The Ethical Handling of Empty Spaces, presented as part of the Adelaide//International at SAMSTAG Museum of Art, Adelaide, 2021. The tactile acrylic print was made in collaboration with Vision Australia, who I have also invited as a service partner for the Newcastle Art Gallery commission, to work with me on developing tactile renders of 2d prints.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Three tactile acrylic prints rest against a wooden box, which has tactile, engraved, granite paintings embedded, as well bronze braille poetry. The prints are tactile renders of the background layers of the gestural poetics screenprints shown in the previous image.

RELEVANCE: This image is also documentation from my exhibition Endnote: The Ethical Handling of Empty Spaces, presented as part of the Adelaide//International 2021. It is included to demonstrate experimentation with translating two dimensional, representational images into tactile renders, in this case through UV printing. It also introduces my interest in considering both tactile and visual aesthetics, so that tactile renders are not secondary to an exhibition, but an integral and cohesive part. The sculpture that the prints are resting against is an example of my past experience integrating bronze braille within sculptural forms, which is a strategy I have also proposed for the Newcastle Art Gallery commission.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A page spread in greyscale from a performative publication, Care is a cognate to grief (2020), which is a collaborative project I co-developed with archivist and designer Lizzie Boon and conservator Sofia Lo Bianco. The spread is extracted from a video reading, commissioned by Shimmer x PUBLICS, Rotterdam/Helsinki, in which I narrated our co-authored text, as the pages flipped. This video reading was an experiment in offering Deaf audiences a more compelling way of accessing narrated information than via standard captions. The image on the left hand side of the spread shows a granite sculpture that I created, sitting outside my home on Djaara country, prior to it being freighted for exhibition. A small hand is reaching from behind.

RELEVANCE: This image is included to show an example of how I have approached a sculptural surface as a page in which to embed text; in this case, the granite sculpture was the page, into which I inserted bronze braille, and also excavated tactile punctuation marks by chiselling. The text on the right hand page offers an example of my interest in weaving imagery and text, and demonstrates my ongoing experiments with unconventional publishing. I have also selected this image to point to my interest in thinking conceptually, critically, culturally and discursively about touch in relation to artworks, including foregrounding histories of handling that are usually unseen by audiences. I have proposed to develop a digital publication that will introduce audiences to my Newcastle Art Gallery Commission. As well as introducing scores to activate the sculptural work, the publication will include a poetic discussion of moments of handling throughout the design, fabrication, and installation process.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Two women stand with their backs to the camera, partially obscuring carved, granite paintings mounted on the wall in front of them. Each painting has a contact microphone attached, and each woman is wearing headphones. They are both touching the paintings. The image is drawn from documentation of an installation at the Incinerator gallery, Melbourne, of tactile and audible granite paintings, which I titled Reading ‘Sequence’ / Tactile Re-call (2018). The compositions of the paintings relate to my memories of walking within and around the sculpture Sequence by Richard Serra, which was installed in SFMOMA.

RELEVANCE: This image is provided as an example of a past work that offered varied perceptual ways of engaging with an artwork. Not visible in the image is a paired sound work, Wayfinding ‘Sequence’ / Vibrational Re-call (2018) that used ultradirectional speakers to bounce an audio collage around the gallery. The audio collage consisted of wayfinding recordings of Georgina Kleege navigating Sequence by Richard Serra, using her mobility cane to shoreline the walls of the sculpture. One of the research components of the Newcastle Art Gallery commission will involve considering audio elements that might offer an additional perceptual dimension to the work, possibly integrated into the digital publication.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A group of children and two artist educators from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, gather around a blue, floor-mounted sculpture; many of the children are touching the sculpture with their hands. A second blue sculpture is suspended above them. Some of the children are wearing blue tunics. The image is drawn from documentation of one of the public programme activities developed for my Bella Room commission at the MCA, With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four (2022).

RELEVANCE: This image is offered as an example of my commitment to working with museum staff, where invited, to develop sensory scores that can be adapted and tailored for a variety of audiences. In this case, the children decorated blue costumes, then danced and made music as they paraded through the MCA, effectively creating movement and sounding sculptures. The Newcastle Art Gallery commission will also involve developing suggestions of scores for engaging with my commission, that the gallery can adapt and tailor for varied public audiences.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A man, actor Ben Phillips, is cradled within a damp rawhide form, suspended from steel cables. His eyes are closed, and his hands are at rest on his chest. The image is drawn from documentation of a private performative session, in which I invited two blind collaborators, Ben Phillips and Janaleen Wolfe, to be the first visitors to a tactile exhibition opening the next day. The exhibtion was From One Body to Another. Sophie Takách and Fayen d'Evie, with Janaleen Wolfe, Ben Phillips and Bryan Phillips. Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, 29 Apr – 2 Jul 2017. Photo by Pippa Samaya.

RELEVANCE: This is included as an example of my sustained interest in steel as a material for exhibition-making, in this instance, in collaboration with sculptor Sophie Takách, who conceived of the mechanisms for attaching and suspending rawhides. The image also demonstrates how I have explored opportunities for blind collaborators and audiences to experience works in an embodied way.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An example of one of my earlier experimental paintings, in which I engraved directional lines into steel, overtop of dye sublimated abstract painting, and then layered spraypainted lines and fragments of copper. The directional engraving introduced fugitive light affects, so that new compositional structures as a viewer moved around the painting. The painting was titled Where's My Money, Punk? (2014), and was exhibited at Minerva gallery, Sydney, installed alongside a short story that I had drafted and edited in parallel to the process of drafting and editing of the painting.

RELEVANCE: This image is included as another example of my sustained interest in steel as a material for experimental engravings and paintings. It also demonstrates my persistent interest in weaving together paintings and texts, which will unfold in a new way in my Newcastle Art Gallery commission.