Material Sound

Material Sound brought together 6 contemporary artists who each created an experience of sound within installations and apparatus constructed from everyday materials.

Curated by Caleb Kelly, Material Sound features newly commissioned work by artists Vicky Browne, Pia van Gelder, Caitlin Franzmann, Peter Blamey, Ross Manning, and Eric Demetriou.

The exhibition opened with a festival of live performances.

The artists in Material Sound challenged the stability of materials in their practice. Handmade instruments and electronics, recycled electronic components, outmoded technologies, fake technologies, imagined sounds and silences formed a series of dynamic installations that challenge the way we think about materiality in a cumulative sound experience.

Artists
Ross Manning is a Brisbane based artist. His work draws together everyday household items that produce light and sound. The objects, once removed from their intended function, create effects that are simple in form yet surprising in outcome. Coloured fluorescent tubes are spun by plastic fans, clock chimes are struck by spinning string and solar panels sound activated by the luminesce of a TV.

Vicky Browne is based in the Blue Mountains. Her practice is concerned with familial sound technology, music culture and consumption. Her sculptural objects seem to have come from an arts and crafts workshop rather than an electronics warehouse, for which doing rather than consuming was the key objective. There is a playful undercurrent to her work that addresses our use of technologies as a material that signposts popular culture.

Pia van Gelder is a Sydney-based electronic artist and researcher. Her work involves designing and building electronic instruments that are presented in performance and interactive installation contexts. Her works investigate our relationships with technology and energy. In Pia’s performances with an analogue audio-video synthesiser, her compositional approaches are deeply rooted in the esoteric history of the electronic image and its harmony with sound.

Peter Blamey is a Sydney-based artist. His work investigates the relationships between people, technologies and their environments, often by exploring their related energies and residues. Peter's practice is typically grass roots and frequently involves establishing interactions between disparate everyday materials in order to produce performances, installations and other artworks that question accepted notions of connectivity, variability and usefulness.

Caitlin Franzmann is a Brisbane-based artist who explores contemporary art’s potential to instigate change by way of critical listening, dialogue and self-empowerment. In reaction to the fast pace and sensory overstimulation of contemporary urban life, she creates situations to encourage slowness, mindful contemplation, and social interaction in both galleries and public spaces. These situations include conversation-based works and immersive sonic spaces such as wearable listening sculptures, architectural interventions and audiowalks.

Eric Demetriou is a Melbourne based artist who creates work that incites a thrill-seeking experience flirting with trouble, danger and pleasure, through outcomes of kinetic sound-based sculpture. Eric’s research focuses on connotations of noise being an undesired excess material, with a political economy that anticipates a reception of hostility. While mischievous behaviour functions with a similar anti-aesthetic and necessity for resistance, its reception is much less offensive and often even forgivable.
His work has been generously supported by Harps Australia.