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 a previous collaborative installation project, in this instance, working with sculptor Sophie Takách, who conceived of the mechanisms for attaching and suspending rawhides, and with actors from the Theatre of the Blind who shaped the works through embodied engagement. There are parallels with ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications..’ Firstly, I will collaborate with costumier Lillian Hull, who is able to analyse the construction techniques, and interpret fabrication histories, bringing expertise that is different and complementary to my creative experience. Secondly, through the mentorship with Joseph Rizzo Naudi, I am again reaching out to a blind collaborator to help shape the installation - this time, shaping language rather than rawhides.

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 a previous collaborative installation project, in this instance, working with sculptor Sophie Takách, who conceived of the mechanisms for attaching and suspending rawhides, and with actors from the Theatre of the Blind who shaped the works through embodied engagement. There are parallels with ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications..’ Firstly, I will collaborate with costumier Lillian Hull, who is able to analyse the construction techniques, and interpret fabrication histories, bringing expertise that is different and complementary to my creative experience. Secondly, through the mentorship with Joseph Rizzo Naudi, I am again reaching out to a blind collaborator to help shape the installation - this time, shaping language rather than rawhides.

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 a previous collaborative installation project, in this instance, working with sculptor Sophie Takách, who conceived of the mechanisms for attaching and suspending rawhides, and with actors from the Theatre of the Blind who shaped the works through embodied engagement. There are parallels with ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications..’ Firstly, I will collaborate with costumier Lillian Hull, who is able to analyse the construction techniques, and interpret fabrication histories, bringing expertise that is different and complementary to my creative experience. Secondly, through the mentorship with Joseph Rizzo Naudi, I am again reaching out to a blind collaborator to help shape the installation - this time, shaping language rather than rawhides.

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 a previous collaborative installation project, in this instance, working with sculptor Sophie Takách, who conceived of the mechanisms for attaching and suspending rawhides, and with actors from the Theatre of the Blind who shaped the works through embodied engagement. There are parallels with ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications..’ Firstly, I will collaborate with costumier Lillian Hull, who is able to analyse the construction techniques, and interpret fabrication histories, bringing expertise that is different and complementary to my creative experience. Secondly, through the mentorship with Joseph Rizzo Naudi, I am again reaching out to a blind collaborator to help shape the installation - this time, shaping language rather than rawhides.

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 sustained commitment over the past decade to developing scores for audiences to encounter artworks through tactility and other senses. I wrote a detailed account of the score used for 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. 

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.

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. It is included to show my commitment to experimenting creatively with methods for expanding access to artworks.

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 then 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 in relation to artworks, including foregrounding histories of handling that are usually unseen by audiences. For ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications…’, I have been imagining possibilities to introduce scores to activate the sensory installation via unconventional publication, that integrates poetic references to some of the archival discoveries of the fabrication and wear of straitjackets, and excerpts from the fictional texts.

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. In relation to ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications…’, the project includes a commitment from Science Gallery staff to be in conversation about possibilities for the gallery to adapt and tailor the installation and scores for varied public audiences.

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 ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications..’ will involve considering audio elements that might offer an additional perceptual dimension to the work, possibly integrated into experiments with the potential for the fictional stories to be incorporated via captioned audio-video screens/projections.

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 a previous collaborative installation project, in this instance, working with sculptor Sophie Takách, who conceived of the mechanisms for attaching and suspending rawhides, and with actors from the Theatre of the Blind who shaped the works through embodied engagement. There are parallels with ‘I close my eyes to the fabrications..’ Firstly, I will collaborate with costumier Lillian Hull, who is able to analyse the construction techniques, and interpret fabrication histories, bringing expertise that is different and complementary to my creative experience. Secondly, through the mentorship with Joseph Rizzo Naudi, I am again reaching out to a blind collaborator to help shape the installation - this time, shaping language rather than rawhides.