Steve Ashby and Vicki Hallett

soundscapes On-site & Online June 7th

Drawn and twisted focuses attention on the sonic qualities of the heritage machines housed in the National Wool Museum of Australia. The work explores the stages of processing wool from raw fleece into commercial products. It portrays an interweaving of the hardship and prosperity inherent to the history of manufacturing sheep’s wool from herding to shearing to finished product. The process yields the thread of comfort and warmth brought to the world in the form of clothing, jackets, blankets, and socks. It has also polluted waterways adjacent to mills where the wool is cleaned, trampled the grasslands to dust with the herding of sheep, and impinged upon the freedom and vitality of indigenous people. Drawn and Twisted is a listening towards a future in which the knowledge from as yet untold stories and perspectives is foregrounded, where a reverence for the land embraces a returned vitality to its native grassland.

Key Exhalation is a work that explores the sonic possibility of breath as a vehicle of continual motion. Air moving through the column of a saxophone exerts the movement of life and the energy expelled through its performance. It is the recurring foundation often backgrounded. The looping nature of breath develops further into a sense of wind that keeps pressing forward. It considers breath as the inherent pulse that paves the way for interaction and experience from one to many.