Erin K Taylor
Entry #3

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We came to coax ghosts of the unsaid, the unsayable or the quietly said from our surrounds, tease out the traces of what is no longer here. Through deep listening one can glimpse via sonic clues that which is not visible.

Woman, nature, chaos are historically pitted against man, mastery/domination and order. The erotic contours, folds, dripping, pouring, ever changing and unpredictability hold great power. Nearly every day I see trucks going up and down the Bogong High Plains Road full of mud and rock that has fallen over the road during the night, there’s the potential that at any moment slippages could wash it all away. The dam system is forced to acknowledge the limits of it’s ability to regulate equilibrium across the course of the scheme, overflow pipes, outlets, walls and drains all abound. An implicit acknowledgement of the limits to which one can control ‘chaos’ or predict or receive the entirety of nature’s flow is built in.

I’ve come to feel like ‘chaos’ is a matter of scale and perspective. What up close is overwhelmingly unique, each iteration completely singular (though connected) forms a unified mass when you zoom out, a non-differentiated part of a whole; the micro and the macro mirror each other in fractal like repetitions of patterns and colours. It occurs to me that at the heart of all the patterns I see is rhythm. The rhythm of the rise and fall of the sun and moon changes our vision and the soundscape that surrounds, the frogs call, birdsong shifts as day moves to night, my breath, the change of seasons and above/below all the inherent rhythm in waves – light, sound, flowing streams. Waves are vibration, vibration is rhythm and all is vibrating. The shape and materials of any thing holds within it a potential for sounding that resonant frequencies unlocks, moving the thing by tapping into it’s quiet vibrations. I’m reminded for a moment of Tesla’s experiment destroying twelve city blocks with an earthquake as he tested this theories of resonance as I feel a wave of resonant feedback vibrating though my feet from the concrete platform I stand on, suspended within an four story bell shaped cavity holding back the weight and momentum of all that has gathered on its way down. Holding a microphone to these underlying forces, flowing with the waves and vibrations has been the most empowering part of this residency experience.

The quietly said, the unspoken represents vast reserves of quiet power operating on a different duration to that we can observe within the duration of a residency or even lifetime; activating these quietly waiting potentials can allow the environment to speak that which seems only a virtual possibility, for a moment becoming the actual within our time space experience.

I’d like to thank Utako for beautiful conversation, Madelynne for her deep wells of enthusiasm (and having us here), Peter for his calm grounded mind and of course Aidan for being an incredible human and collaborator.