If we are to speak of a primacy of sense, then our eyes hold this title. For most of us, the way we come to know the world is through our eyes.
The world is not simply a visual canvas, however, and the role our other senses might play in decoding the complexities of experience can’t be overlooked, to use an ocularly loaded term.
Site Listening : Brisbane is a work that celebrates our audition. It is the act of attentive listening in any chosen location, privileging the auditory environment as the focus of awareness and interest. Site Listening invites us to reconsider our ways of being in, and knowing, the world. It’s an opportunity to connect deeply to our capacities as listeners and to lean in to the sound fields we find ourselves within.
– Lawrence English
Documentation of Site Listening : Brisbane with Lawrence English at the Spring Mountain Conservation Estate and City Hall Clock Tower. The Conservation Estate, including White Rock, remains sacred to the Traditional Owners (Yaggera and Yuggarrapul groups) of Ipswich. Please respect Cultural Protocol and follow the established walking trails. Video: Greg Harm.
About the artist
Lawrence English is an artist, composer and curator based in Australia. Working across an array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work explores the politics of perception and prompts questions of field, perception and memory. English utilises a variety of approaches including visceral live performance and site-specific installation to create work that invites audiences to consider their relationship to listening, place and embodiment. Over the past decade, he has worked with sound as a medium for embodied experience and is determined to share his interests in the transformative and sensorial transgressive possibilities of sound. He is a Sidney Myer Creative fellow, was awarded an outstanding doctorial thesis award in conjunction with his PhD in 2017 and has been supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for his public artwork project in Los Angeles, Seirá.
Find out more about Lawrence in Issue #3 of SUNNIE Magazine.
MoB’s Artist in Residence program is supported by Tim Fairfax AC.
