gATHERING SCORES
Janaleen Wolfe ON Welcoming
If you notice someone enter, greet them with a whistle or a hum…
(Adaptation of a Pauline Oliveros meditation)
ALEX Craig ON SENSING SPACE
As you enter the space, notice and greet with your body the air contained within.
With every part of the body available to you today, taste, smell, feel, look and interact with the air that lives in this space.
You might gaze at it with your swivelling shoulders, taste it with a scrape of the foot, smell it with the crown of your head, feel it as you push against it with a jutting hip.
Notice the texture and weight of the air as you interact with it; is it a solid, heavy weight pressing on your body, or a fluid stream of light?
How do you shape it with your movements, and how do you allow it to shape you and the way you move within this place?
Offered in response to: Hillary Goidell, ‘To Catch a Thing in Flight’ (2020). Audiodescription of the film Shape of an Echo 2019 by Anna Seymour, Fayen d'Evie and Pippa Samaya (a gestural description of the sound work Hauntings H M Castlemaine 2019 by Andrew Slater (a description of the Old Castlemaine Gaol composed from field recordings)).
KATIE WEST
Score for Fayen, from Katie
Unbundling
Hold bundle
Follow fabric ridges as they fold, crease, encase
Follow fabric ridges to find an opening
Loosen and roll
fabric and object
Hold fabric
Hold object
Hold them with care like family heirlooms
Keep in mind, fabric and object may be bundled again
Bundling
Place object upon fabric
Guide and nestle fabric, along and around the object
Fold, nestle and roll fabric and object together
Mind edges
Mind weight
Shift subtly, subtly secure
Keep in mind, this bundle may be unbundled again
Georgina Kleege: Handling Score for a Fossilized Handshake
Take its weight in your palm. Invert and rotate. Try new orientations until it feels most at home.
Try it in the other hand. Carefully trace its outlines with your index and third finger. Watch out for the sharper protrusions.
Marvel at the regular beading along one edge, and now the other. How did that happen?
As you ponder this, worry the ridges with the pad of your thumb. Try counting the creases with your fingernail.
With the lightest possible touch, feel for the shallow pores and divots.
What do you make of that hole in the upper right (if it is upper or right)?
Note how thin the metal is there, as fragile as shell, pressed to the point it almost ceases to be metal How did that happen?
Reconstruct the positions of the two hands that made this shape. My thumb was here, your thumb was….
Isn’t it funny that we say “press the flesh” when in fact it’s the muscles yearning to press bone to bone?
As you ponder this, lift it to your face and press it gently against your cheek. Now rest it against your jawline. Sandwich it between your two palms. Slowly, mindful of the sharper protrusions, press your palms together. Interlace your fingers to make a neat parcel. Wait for it to take your heat. Wait for the moisture to rise to the surface of your skin. Now, lift your two hands to your face as you incline your head to meet them .
Slowly, deeply, inhale its scent.
Repeat.
Offered in response to: Sophie Takách, ‘handling (encounter between Fayen d'Evie and Georgina Kleege, July 2016)’ (2016-2021). Bronze, 90 x 70 x 45mm.
LIZZIE BOON ON READING
Draft publication layout: Sofia Lo Bianco and Fayen d'Evie, Care is a Cognate to Grief, 2020/2, published by 3-ply.
Printed with Trent Walter
This vitrine is not a container or a boundary,
instead, pages positioned for tactile observation.
Engraved, carved, impressed, inscribed,
each an invitation for skin to feel material sensation.
Of paper, wood, brass, and perspex.
There is no single system to how the body should read,
it may configure itself at whichever point it is drawn.
Perhaps first landing at an edge, a face, a corner,
then shifting across or around its surface.
‘Audiences and spectators are readers,
and in parallel,
authors and co-authors
of interpretive ideas and tangential remarks,
introducing fragments of thought from beyond the animated museum.’
The curious body of the reader
may re-orientate
to pick up, circle, crouch, step away.
Each time re-engaging
to read a letter, a texture, a phrase,
adjusting attention to the subtleties of materiality.
Surfaces may raise or depress,
be smooth or rough.
The material may drag,
run fluid,
or be jagged under touch.
‘As Erica Fretwell cautions,
in the world of touch,
to read is to erase,
erasure as an act of inscription,
that wears away at fragile dots,
while depositing oils and skin cells.
To read by touch is a form of
autobiographical annotation.
Sensing peripheries,
self-sensing peripheries. [1]
[1] Footnote here Erica Fretwell, ‘Stillness is a move: Helen Keller and the kinaesthetics of autobiography’ (Fretwell, 2013).’
In the body’s interpretation
it may notice sensations transfer,
quiet or loud.
Traces of words arriving in the reader.
Traces of the contributing reader, now co-author,
leaving particles, unsettling dust, wearing away surfaces,
reading.
Jennifer JustiCe ON DESCRIBING AN ARTWORK
Trip the Light Ekphrastic: a guide
Start from the knowledge that nobody owns your way of experiencing a work of art but you. Just like nobody owns the idea of anything - this includes museums, exhibitions, or land or stars and sea. Nobody does your way of being in the world better than you do. Also, there are no official rules here, only gentle guidance as desired. What is the martial art where practitioners are taught to use their opponent's force to propel their own counter maneuvers? I imagine there is also a way that dancers serendipitously use each others' motions to drive a performance. Think of ekphrasis as a collaborative, generative practice in conversation with others, a personal monologue in concert. There is absolutely no need to center visual information if describing how something looks is not your cup of tea.
For those who prefer more structured or practical encouragement, you might set your own constraints: write only two word responses to the art, or write a drum solo. Talk about what the work of art reminds you of or how it makes you feel. Describe its textures or temperature. What is its relationship to space and place? Does it give off a vibe? Can you walk around it in your mind, or does it resist interpretation?
Read poetry or listen to music every day. Buy some art from your favorite local artist. Notice the ways in which art history lionizes some artists and excludes others and actively resist bias.
You don’t even have to like something to respond to it - at times I have even found it preferable to really hate a work of art because it reveals so much about your relationship to the object or performance in the moment. Our passions add resonance to who we are in the world. Now all this is starting to sound a bit woo woo- my apologies. Succinctly put, describe art anyway you want, using any form you want: compose an opera for Coco Fusco, bake a cake as homage to Ellen Gallagher, freestyle to Ruth Asawa, write Moyra Davey’s grocery list, compose a rhyming couplet for Emily Jacir, choreograph a dressage routine to Meshes of the Afternoon, draft a love letter to Kaylene Whiskey.
Okay, I lied - there is one rule. You must devote some time and thought to the art, whatever it may be. When I have worked in museums or galleries, certain pieces came to feel like old friends with all the idiosyncrasies and vulnerability that comes with familiarity. I’m not asking you to buy Derek Jarman’s Blue an engagement ring (although we have all known of more ill-fated unions, haven’t we?) Just give your imaginative attention to the art, then, to riff on a Jasper Johns quote: take an object, respond to it, do something else in response to it.
Gathering Biographies
a slowly assembling cloud of biographies of collaborators and contributors, accumulating as entries are received
presently in flux
Janaleen Wolfe is an actress based in Sydney who creates character and sound performances drawing on voice and imagination.
Katie West is an artist and Yindjibarndi woman of the Pilbara tablelands with a strong sense of home in Noongar boodja. Using found and naturally dyed textiles, Katie creates installations and happenings to invite attention to the ways we weave our stories, places, histories and futures. www.katiewularniwest.com/
Jennifer Justice is an artist and writer living in Northern California. Her recent work includes computer-generated and tactile sculptural installations, as well as ekphrastic poetry to promote accessible design in exhibition and public spaces. She is also interested in disability culture and the ecological landscape.
Hillary Goidell is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She collaborates with choreographers to photograph their creative process, both emotional and physical, and expands on this work through multisensorial research and audiodescription. She also documents larger processes like end of life; these images act as imprints for accessing embodiment and lived experience. www.hillarygoidell.com
Holly Craig is a dance artist and performance maker based in Sydney. From their lived history of Blindness, Holly creates movement works which activate critical discourse on social issues through personal narratives.
Lizzie Boon is an archivist, arts registrar, writer, and occasional designer, currently living and working on Wurundjeri country. She is interested in the expanded potentials of publishing, particularly its embodied possibilities. Lizzie is also studying psychology, which is increasingly guiding her perspective on making.
Georgina Kleege is a blind writer interested in representations of blindness across all facets of visual culture, and the ways these representations impact access to the arts.
Vincent Chan is a type designer based in Naarm. He is interested in commoning, pedagogy, language and letters and where they overlap, co-mingle and meld. www.matterofsorts.com
Irina Povolotskaya (Purple Fairy Phoenix) is a deafblind performer from Moscow. She is active in theater, music, and painting, writes articles on these topics, and composes prose, poetry, and scripts. She worked as a psychologist for many years, and is the founder of Cosmoopera Performing Arts. www.ipovolotskaya.ru
Andy Slater is a blind media artist from Chicago, working in the mediums of sound, extended reality, web art, science fiction,installation and performance. Much of his art is focused on accessibility, blind wayfinding, and sonic drifting. www.thisisandyslater.net
Harriet Jones follows a curiosity in ways of understanding and the interference from language-frames we habitually use to locate and identify, in search of untidy & empathetic alternatives. She is a curator and collaborator who lives and works on Wurundjeri country.
Kate Disher-Quill is a Melbourne based artist working across photography, moving image, publication, multimedia and author of Earshot - a publication exploring the myriad of experiences of deafness. As a visual communicator she is drawn to stories that matter and translating these experiences into art. www.katedisherquill.com
Trent Walter is an artist, printer and publisher interested in the overlap of printed matter, contemporary art and community-based practice based in Naarm, Melbourne. www.negativepress.com.au/
Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary disabled artist, who uses a manual wheelchair for mobility. Her work crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. Enduring concerns are agency, representation, the limits of empathy, and how these impact people across different marginalised intersections. Her work is deeply informed by her experiences as a disabled woman of Afro-Caribbean descent, and her training as a legal practitioner.
Adam Leslie is a snake catcher and cabinetmaker, whose work usually derives from a Shaker ethos and function over form. When not relocating snakes or joining pieces of wood together, his mind swirls with science fiction, mythology, occult philosophy, geopolitics, and myriad flora and fauna of the Stringybark country where he lives and works.
Tommy Carroll is a drummer, composer, and beatmaker from Chicago who happens to be totally blind. He leads Tommy Carroll’s Calculated Discomfort, an 8 piece Jazz dance collective that has played in a wide variety of venues throughout Chicago. He recently released a celebratory album called, Dances for Different Bodies, Vol. I, providing a sonic display of his own take on disability culture. www.tcdrums.com
Khang Chiem is an Australian Sign Language (Auslan) interpreter based in Melbourne, living on the Country of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation. He is passionate about facilitating access to the intersection of ideas, expression and stories for the Deaf community.