Learning to Listen

Abstract

Sometime in 2017, I moved from Melbourne, Australia to Dublin, Ireland. I’d studied and exhibited art in Australia, and in becoming an immigrant, I risked leaving my life and community behind to start somewhere else as a stranger. My work in Australia had centred around the connections between science, space and storytelling. It had also been, as all art is, a portrait of myself, albeit a heavily buried and obscured one. The move disrupted that work, and in my Dublin studio, I began making friends and exploring ways to make art that felt new and relevant. The dislocation that goes hand in hand with moving to the other side of the world crept into my practice. Listening to music felt like a way to time travel. I had an inkling that I wanted to write about music, but I stopped myself because it seemed so far away from the artwork that I’d previously made. Another reason that I didn’t, though, is purely that it didn’t fit at the time. Now it does, and the idea I had in 2019 is back: