biography

Kate McMillan b. 1974 United Kingdom
Lives and works in Perth, Australia

Education
1999 - Masters in Creative Arts, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia
1997 – Honours in Fine Arts, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia
1994 – Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia

Solo Exhibitions:
2008 – lost, John Curtin Gallery, Perth, Australia
2005 – Broken Ground, Margaret Moore Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia
2004 – Disaster Narratives, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Perth International Arts Festival
2001 – Undercover, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Australia
2001 – Sacrificial Economy, Verge Gallery, Perth, Australia
2000 – Hedge, Rubyayre Gallery, Sydney, Australia
2000 – Ambiguous Objectives, PICA, Perth, Australia
1999 – New work, Verge Gallery, Perth Australia
1998 – New work, Verge Gallery, Perth Australia
1997 – New work, Artshouse Gallery, Perth, Australia

Recent Group Exhibitions:
2010 – Islands of Incarceration, Cockatoo Island (commissioned work), Sydney Biennale, curated by David Elliott
2009/10 – Built, Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Jenepher Duncan
2008 – Silver: 25 years of Artrage, PICA, Perth, Australia
2006 – If you leave me can I come too? Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Australia
2005 – I have seen some strange places, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, Australia
2004 – Regionale 5, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland
2003 – Mixtape, Art Gallery of Western Australia
2003 – Wild Frontier, Downtown, Adelaide
2003 – Flux: Uncertain States, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth, Australia
2002 – Neo Geo, John Curtin Gallery, Perth, Australia
2002 – Moving Collection, Govett Brewster Gallery, New Zealand
2002 – Urban Anxiety, Artrage Festival, Perth, touring to 1aspace, Hong Kong
2001 – Loop, Moores Building, Fremantle, Australia
2001 – do it, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth International Arts Festival
2000 – Nightswimming, curated by Dr Robert Cook, Craftwest, Perth International Arts Festival
1999 – Re:body, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Australia

Residencies
2002 – Australia Council Studio, Tokyo
2003 – Red Gate Gallery studio, Beijing
2003 – one month self funded research, Berlin
2004 – six month self-funded research, Basel, Switzerland

Commissions
2009 – Whispering Hills, Private Commission, Perth
2009/10 – Islands of Incarceration, Sydney Biennale, Curated by David Elliott

Board Appointments:
1997-2001 Verge Inc Artist Run Initiative
2000-2005 Perth Institute of Contemporary Art
2005-2008 National Association for the Visual Arts
2000 - 2008 Industry Advisor/ Peer Assessor for Australia Council for the Arts and NAVA.

Awards & Grants
1998 – Australian Postgraduate Award with Stipends (to undertake MCA)
2001 – Project Grant, ArtsWA
2003 – Project Grant, ArtsWA
2005 – Artflight Grant, ArtsWA
2008 – Mid-Career Creative Development Fellowship, Department for Culture and the Arts
2009 – Established Artist New Work Grant, Australia Council for the Arts

Collections
Art Gallery of Western Australia; City of Perth; Wesfarmers; Curtin University of Technology; various Australian private collections

Broken Ground, 2005

This exhibition comprised entirely of photographs, primarily in diptych format with the exception of two works (four of ten shown here). Each of the objects and landscapes documented were taken across Europe in 2004. Included is a photograph of Freud's mirror in his (now 'museumed') office, the phone in the Stasi Director's office in Berlin, infamous WWll train stations, forests were various european conflicts have occurred and so on. These seemingly benign objects and landscapes underpin a response to the historical landscape of europe marred by conflict and human horror and my own sense of being overwhelmed by these piling narratives. This exhibition was shown at Margaret Moore Contemporary Art in late 2005.

Undercurrent, 2004

This work was created for Regional 5 at the Kunsthaus Baselland curated by Sabine Schaschl in 2004. The work was a response to an attempted suicide I observed late one night on a local bridge over the Rhine in Basel. The image is the view of the rhine from the bridge. The surrounding objects including cardboard rocks talks about the spectacle of trauma and my own implicitness in this through what are almost 'props' in the work. 

Tidelands, 2003

This work was created for an exhibition curated by John Barrett-Lennard entitled Flux and shown at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Perth, Western Australia. Tidelands was partially created from a self organised residency in Berlin and brought a number of landscapes together; these included the abandoned embassy buildings in the former East Berlin, the outline of fault line which created the Darling Escarpment to the east of Perth and the legal border which identifies international waters off the Western Australian coastline. The shells placed on shelves along the wall follow the international water boundary and I have included shells that have been used in trade over many centuries throughout the world. A conch shell used by Indigenous peoples in Western Australia is also included as well as the rough outline demarcating Noonghar land by the first settlers (shown as an orange shape). The title of this work refers to the shifting economic and political borders of land.

Sometimes I photograph people and wonder if they are happy, 2004

These series of six photographs (4 shown here) were taken during a six month residency in Basel, Switzerland. The document the lives of strangers along the Rhine. The work was a kind of melancholy exploration and meditation on the people and their relationships which I observed but did not directly engage with. I also explored the formal qualities of the images and used these as part of a methodology to string this series of images together.

photographic works 2002-2003

These images are a selection of photographs from 2002 until 2003 that resulted from a Australia Council residency in Tokyo. Since this time I have used the process of photography as one of the main starting points of my creative process. Sometimes these images are developed into larger scale installations and sometimes they remain as photographic images. often the two aspects of my practice run parallel through the same research. These images taken in Japan and later edited and focused explore two parallel projects - Concepts on the Verge of Collapse 2002/03 comprising of 16 photographs that examined the structures of homeless people across Japan and specifically in Tokyo and Floating 2002 (not shown here) that documented the mirrors strewn across the busy streets of Japan in the absence of traffic lights. I think the odd position I took as artist/observer without language and normal ways of engaging in the economy is reflected in these works. They are really significant to me as they mark a turning point in my practice from a formalist sculptural practice into a more conceptually driven multi-media practice. 

occupation, 2002/2003

This work was produced after an Australia Council Residency in Tokyo in 2002. This work marks a shift in my practice from a formal sculptural practice that engaged with materialism and the politics of form and space into a installation and photographic practice that was engaged primarily with ideas, landscape, politics, memory and power.
Occupation, 2002/2003 was shown at the 2003 Artrage Festival, Iaspace, Hong Kong and at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2004 where it now resides in their permanent collection.
Occupation examined the relationship between Australia and Japan post WWll and the way politics and ownership shift and change. This work explores the changing spaces of Tokyo's homeless population that came about after Macarthy and his systematic changes to Japan's economy and social system.

Lapses in Judgement, 2005

This work was made for an exhibition at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne. The exhibition was curated by Jeff Khan. This work was developed during a residency in Switzerland with the Christoph Merian Stiftung. The work features the bear pits situated on entry into the city of Bern as well as a projection of a grove of dead trees on Rottnest Island. Rottnest features heavily in my work as it was a location I holidayed at as a child. Unaware of its history as an Indigenous Prison for much of the 20th century, this beuatiful Island resides uneasily in my consciousness. The small wooden chair is the only item I salvaged from my biological parents marriage, the 'spider' plant, the only plant I recall my mother growing successfully.
More information about this project can be found on the Gertrude Street website.

Disaster Narratives, 2004

This large installation was made for the Perth International arts Festival held at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2004. The work comprises of a large 'billboard' style print, video projection, conch shell indigenous to the area and a still video (screen) embedded into the wall. This work pulls together a number of landscapes that explore buried narratives and histories including Mao Tse Tung's underground tunnels in Beijing, Rubble Hill in Berlin and Rottnest Island, former Indigenous prison in Western Australia.
An accompanying catalogue with essay by Dr Ian McLean is available from PICA.

History's debris (and other things you forgot and I tried not to remember)

This work was developed for an exhibition held at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2006 and curated by Bec Dean. The image printed on to the fabric was taken from an historic image of the landscape after the 19th century volcanic eruption at Lake Tarawera in New Zealand. This image shows the desolation of this once lush landscape, which would later become the site of my Father's holiday home almost 100 years later. This sombre work was made in response to my father's death. The eruption which destroyed this landscape and buried surrounding villages as people slept was used as a metaphor for the circumstances of my Father's death. A crude sound recording of a child's metal spinning top accompanies the work.
History's debris (and other things you forget and I tried not to remember) is held in a private collection.

lost, 2008 John Curtin Gallery

lost
by Geraldine Barlow
Curator, Monash Museum of Art
(the text below is from the accompanying catalogue which is available through johncurtingallery.com.au)

Can history be held in the landscape: in the fine weave of individual experience, or in the narratives shared by families and communities?

This is a question Kate McMillan has explored over the past decade, in works connecting her own personal experience to family history, as well as to broader histories of place. In lost McMillan builds upon the methodology established in earlier works, offering an experience of a landscape which is simultaneously out there, in the world, as well as an interior space of intensity, emotion and metaphor.

Our journey into the work begins with four views of the landscape: an island on the lake near the childhood home of McMillan’s father; a pale grey expanse of liquid mud bordered by pines and scrub; a belch of such mud from the thermal guts of the earth and, finally, a path of woven shadows cut through a dense thicket of trees.

These four images hover like stepping stones in a darkened antechamber, or vestibule. We pass by them before entering the second gallery, where a deep electric murmur resonates, so low it affects the body as much as the ear — coursing and reverberating within. This space seems to swallow as well as emanate sound. Within it, surrounding us, we recognise the image of the island on the lake: cropped, stretched and printed upon a sheer expanse of curtain, falling from the four walls of the gallery. The island view surrounds us; it encloses us and yet is also a kind of window to another place. This intensely interior experience of a landscape locates us on a kind of stage, we are at once audience and protagonist, we stand in the light but sense a weight of darkness also.

…

In making lost McMillan chose to return to a place of deep significance to her father, the vicinity of Tarawera and Rotorua in New Zealand. The lakeside view of a small island familiar to him in his formative years is a leitmotif in this work and comes to stand for much that McMillan didn’t know about her father, as well as the loss of this important figure in her life. McMillan has chosen to transform this key image into something monumental and yet fragile. We initially encounter the island as a photograph, a framed artwork, but in this inner sanctum it has become a kind of furnishing, or prop. Through the material transformation of the image we are invited to consider it differently, perhaps to ask; ‘If we were to look through an image, as if it were a veil, what would we see on the other side?

The landscapes featured in lost were all profoundly shaped by the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera, an event in which many died and the Maori villages within a six kilometre radius of the mountain were buried in mud and ash.
As a young child I visited this area with my family. I remember ‘the buried village’, a small scale tourist attraction, where we walked under a green and verdant canopy of leaves, stooping to enter partially excavated houses of ponga, or tree fern, and inspecting the brick hearth of former ovens. What happened to all the people? The path through the ‘village’ winds along a small stream where trout swim in dappled shadows and a wishing well is built into the rock face. I remember it as a beautiful and haunting place.

And yet landscapes do not always reveal their history in this way. Sometimes the sites of previous trauma bear no tell-tale scars. What is it that makes a place haunted, our own knowledge of what has occurred there, or something communicated to us through the place itself? Can this occur when we look at the image of such a site? Can we be at rest, or happy, in a place where others have experienced sorrow? Does time soothe or heal trauma, veil or bury it? And within us, do time and memory operate in similar ways?

Kate McMillan says of lost and its relation to her father:

This work is about what made him: his childhood, swimming out to the island with his brother and sister and fishing for trout in the wooden dinghy. On my trip to New Zealand, I saw an old photograph of him, he was sitting, legs bridged, on the verandah of the Tarawera home, he must have been about fourteen years old. He looked desperately sad, gazing off to the side. I don't think he was aware of the camera.

Why didn't I know this person when he was alive?

The island is like a place over water, beyond reach, an age old metaphor. I didn't even know about the island at Tarawera until I was there. How odd, for years I have used islands in my work — as if the knowing of it being there was in me all along.

This work is perhaps a form of meditation upon the impact of this unexpected death. Through her practice as an artist, McMillan brings into being an external, or public, expression of her emotional world. Yet this is also an intensely private and veiled work, without family photographs or confessional texts. lost operates through layers of metaphor, seeking both to express something of the artist’s own emotional state as well as to weave a path through the broader human experience of loss.

…

As a metaphor, the island has a long and rich history in our cultural imagination, a place of magical other worlds occupied by castaways and adventurers, a place where new social orders — utopian and dystopian — might evolve. Islands have long represented a world beyond the familiar and terrestrial, sometimes they are a waypoint on the journey into the afterlife, at other times the final destination of the dead. In Aeotearoa / New Zealand, Maori believe that after death the spirit of the deceased will travel north, to the leaping off point at Te Reinga, or Cape Reinga. Here the spirits will leap from the cliff and swim past the trio of islands, the Three Kings, before returning to the ancestral home of Hawaiki. Reinga itself, means underworld and the largest of the Three Kings is named, Manawatawhi, or ‘last breath’. 1.

The tangible landscape can offer a path into the unknown, but it is a path which requires some kind of leap or change of state from us. A leap of the imagination, as if into the air, or beneath the surface of the water, we must step aside from the expected to travel such paths, making them our own. McMillan’s work summons us to make just such a leap. Her photographs are cool, but not entirely documentary, the landscapes are pleasant but not quite post-card perfect, they are like a stage without the actors - as we walk from one to another a kind of expectancy builds in us. Entering the inner space of the curtained room with its vertiginous stretch of island/curtain/veil and deep, low melody of fluctuating interior pressure we feel a sense of disquiet. What is expected of us here, what should we do or feel? Whilst the sound is not a drum roll, it does induce the feeling that we should prepare ourselves for something which is just about to unfold. This sense of expectancy stretches, unbroken and uncomfortable.

The inner volume of lost takes us within ourselves, the sound, designed for the work by Perth sound artist Cat Hope presses itself into us and stretches through us. The sound is structured in multiple layers, some initially drawn from the bass guitar and stretched to a length of twenty three minutes, as well as down, so low as to be at the limits of the human auditory range and below - another underworld. At one point I hear the high craw of the crow and can’t decide whether this is in the work or my mind. The gallery is so sound proofed and buffered as to seem deep within the earth. This inner chamber has been carefully constructed so as to be close to acoustically ‘dead’. It is strangely like a crypt, this room of sheer curtains imprinted with the image of a sunlit island on a lake.

…

Standing in this interior space of unease, I imagine being trapped in a submarine deep beneath the sea, breathing rationed and stale air, listening to the metallic creaks which signal the weight and pressure of all the fathoms of salt water above, or perhaps what it is to be within the grip of a massive glacier, with its own alien song of ice-cracks and the slow movement of a massive weight and pressure. Such experiences are brought to mind in this inner gallery – vivid, anxious and interior. McMillan has created a space in which we lose our sense of balance. In the inner gallery, the stretched image of the island seems as if it were seen through half closed eyes after spinning around, and around and around. Spinning into vertigo, and nausea perhaps.

An unspoken and yet profound aspect of our well-being is based on having a normally functioning sense of balance. […] When we talk of ‘feeling settled’ or ‘unsettled’, balanced’ or unbalanced’, ‘rooted’ or ‘rootless’, ‘grounded’ or ‘ungrounded’, we are speaking vestibular language. […] We have senses we don’t know we have - until we lose them; balance is one that normally works so well, so seamlessly, that it is not listed amongst the five that Aristotle described and was overlooked for centuries afterward. 2.

The vestibular system determines our sense of balance as well as our spatial perception. The word vestibule is derived from the Latin vestibulum, or entry court. The vestibular system incorporates aspects of vision and hearing, key inputs in how we place and orient ourselves in the world. Symbolic of spatial confusion, the labyrinth occurs not only in Greek mythology but also in the structures of the inner ear: passages of bone, fine membranes and bodies of liquid relaying sound and regulating pressure. These structures are perhaps another kind of underworld, or interior world, a mechanism which describes the workings of the body and perception as well as an interior landscape closely linked to our sense of emotional wellbeing.

Lost offers us an intense, disorientating and claustrophobic sense of trauma. Whilst this work can be ‘read’ intellectually it is above all felt, physically. As if the body might know it better than the mind. Thinking back to my first experience of the loss of a loved one, my grandfather, I recall a dream very soon after he died in which I was relieved to again be embracing him. My arms were around him, I could feel the solidity of his body and smell his familiar woollen jumper. I felt at home and safe and loved. But then I remembered he had died, and wondered what I was embracing. My dream had offered me the comfort of all that I missed, only to become a nightmare. My body and mind were out of synch with each other.

…

lost is about an intense experience of grief and mourning. But it also suggests the possibility of moving beyond this state. The closed curtain, bearing the imprint of this small island on Lake Tarawera is a kind of veil, a membrane between two states, life and death, dark and light, interior and exterior. Perhaps this veil has a protective role, separating these different states and allowing for a formal parting to occur. In parting, we push aside the soft folds of the curtain separating inside from out, as well as taking our leave.


1. Barry Mitcalfe, Te Rerenga Wairua, Te Ao Hou, No. 35, June 1961 or online at http://teaohou.natlib.govt.nz/journals/teaohou/issue/Mao35TeA/c20.html
2. Norman Doidge, The Brain that changes itself, Scribe, Melbourne, 2007, p.3

Biennale of Sydney

Islands of Incarceration
Timber Drying Shed, Cockatoo Island

Biennale of Sydney 2010
Curated by David Elliott

CONCEPT/BACKGROUND

This project continues to extend and draw on my interest into Australian history, in particular, the inequities of colonial interaction with original inhabitants. As a white Australian, this is very much a conscious attempt to contextualise my own history and that of my ancestors within a discourse about contemporary social, creative and political issues.
Central to this investigation has been an overarching examination into landscape and its capacity to contain and evoke history and trauma. Given the extremely sketchy documentation of conflict during the early period of colonisation, this is a particularly apt way of experiencing and understanding the Australian landscape.
I have been continually interested in the notion of ‘an island’. Both as a physical description of Australia and the coastal islands that surround the continent – as well as ‘the island’ as a psychological construct that can simultaneously describe a state of alienation, and of fantasy and escape. Over many years I have researched the history of Rottnest Island in Western Australia. It is currently used as a beautiful holiday destination, but was previously used as an Indigenous Prison. The panopticon style Prison is used today as three star accommodation. This history is not signposted and is brushed over in the Rottnest Museum. As a child we would holiday there and I recall feeling that parts of the island were being haunted – the wind-bent peppermint groves, empty and desolate, but for the elements. Unmarked graves remain in a paddock-sized area loosely referred to as the ‘Aboriginal cemetery’. This previous and current interest in islands pulls me towards Cockatoo Island as a place to create site-specific work.
More broadly it is the extraordinary contrast between the beauty of our landscape and its history that has been an ongoing theme in my work. I have worked in various locations in Australia and around the world researching and documenting landscapes marred by trauma. This is the central component in my approach to the proposed Islands of Incarceration. And it is ultimately the sunny disquiet of Australia and our colonial history that underpins my position as an Australian contemporary artist.
Islands of Incarceration draws together two sites – Cockatoo Island and the Ludlow Tuart Forest located in the South-West of Western Australia, the site of the 1841 Wonnerup
Massacre in which up to three hundred Wardandi Noongar people are said to have been massacred and buried in the forest over a period of five years. The massacre occurred in response to the fatal spearing of George Layman after he held a thirteen-year-old Aboriginal girl captive in his homestead . The elder who speared him, Gaywal, was killed some years later and his head was decapitated and left on a stick as a warning to other Wardandi Noongar. The rich and abundant culture of the Wardandi people was decimated and only a very small number of original family members survive.
The forest is now a detour on the trip to the Margaret River Wine Region and has been made a national park. It contains no record of what occurred there other than what is recorded at Wonnerup House (see footnote 2).
During my research for this project I stumbled across a PhD submission that details the incarceration of eight Aboriginal men on Cockatoo Island in the first two decades of Settlement . Whilst this is not central to my proposal, it most certainly belies the thesis of my work – that our landscape is so extraordinarily layered, often in the most horrific sense. And that perhaps it is this refusal to name our past, which causes so much discontent and malaise in our present nation.

CONCEPT/PROJECT OUTLINE

The top floor of a timber drying shed is coming apart and is utterly weathered. Barely alive. But so present. Perched high on the hill of Cockatoo Island - exposed – encircled by the perimeter of this urban island and by the harbour. As you approach this building you see the exterior and interior equally. The walls and floors are timber slats, evenly spaced. Are they burnt? They are so dark. I am struck by the beautiful contrast of light and dark as the sun falls across the side of the building. I imagine that from the top floor an almost panorama. The building is like a watchful eye. What has been watched on this island? Controlled. I think of all the things seen across this nation of ours but never spoken. A silent eye.
This shed keeps reminding me of the Ludlow Tuart Forest and my research there. Only Tuart – so odd. It is two hours south of my home city of Perth. Magnificent tall trees. They were once pulled down and stripped and dried. Ludlow was a timber town. They now sit in eerie silence. No scrub beneath their trunks. Just dappled shade onto cold, hard, damp leaf strewn ground. No one comes here really – the odd car passes through but doesn’t stop. Everyone I speak with who has driven this route remembers the disconcerting energy that passes through the place and the feeling of being compelled to exit it quickly. But no one can tell me what happened there.
The forest is below sea level on limestone ground, a short walk to the ocean. Wonnerup Estuary sits between the forest and the beach – a dead water. This is where things are said to be buried – things from yesterday. The ocean and the tuart trees, caretakers for all that is buried beneath them. Bones too. Maybe hundreds of bones. Aboriginal bones. For small indiscretions that seem hardly notable .
Recently I was wandering through the forest, alone with my camera. I came across a small area of burnt out bush. I am not sure whether it was a burn-off or a small spot fire. The smell of ash still overwhelmingly present. Everything had been swallowed by flames. Despite this, small forest orchids were beginning to sprout, death lilies too. Seedpods splayed open in order to release life for the next generation of Tuart. How bizarre that this landscape seeks devastation to regrow. This strange world where trees shed their bark not their leaves. I have taken a panorama of this burnt out grove. It was clear to me instantly that this group of images would be what I will use for Islands of Incarceration.
But after reflecting back on the images I had taken, I looked at the tall tuart trees that had remained untouched by fire. They were majestic. Standing tall despite everything. This also seemed right. I have presented these two views and will continue to ponder upon this as the project develops.
In the coming weeks I will revisit the site. Possibly to witness the re-burial of some bones recently uncovered. I will talk more with the Wardandi people and move slowly, taking stock of myself as I inhabit their space. I see my ideas continuing to mature and take on the complexity that this project deserves.


DESCRIPTOR
Islands of Incarceration.

I imagine a fine, elegant, single pleated veil curtaining around the inside of the top floor in an elliptical shape from the Southwest corner to the Northeast corner of the first floor of the timber drying shed. Gathering in folds on the floor, reaching up high into the ceiling and meeting at the suspended tracking. The burnt tuart trees printed onto the surface of the fabric - the translucency of the fibre allowing the image to be read from both sides. The panorama of the forest now surrounds us. It colours the view of the harbour and Sydney surrounds as we try to look out beyond the work. We walk in and around and through it. It catches in the wind, blowing out through the cracks of the slats and the wide-open doorways. It makes us aware of the weather and of our own body as we feel the work against us. This movement manipulates the image. The subtle pleats in the curtain mirror the vertical trunks.
Beforehand, as we approach the shed, it is higher and above us. An immediate sense of unease is present as if someone has left the windows open as a storm approaches, the curtains billowing out – we know instantly that something is amiss. We enter a place that something has happened in once, maybe recently or a long time ago. More likely it is something that continues to happen, yet we can’t put our finger on it.
We can’t escape this land. The memories it holds. The histories it conceals. What we have concealed.
The work is lit from within as the sun falls away, for night-time viewing. A beacon, a lighthouse. There is sound that bleeds out into the air as you approach the work. Slowly working on you, and when you are inside the work, it bleeds into you. Utterly present but somehow almost unconscious. It contextualises the way you read the image. It sets the tone of the work. You take the sound away with you. Inside you. The image too. You remember the veil flapping or fluttering (depending on the weather) in the wind. You can hear it. It may have touched you as you stood within it.
It is unknown what this sound may be. Working with Cat Hope, sound artist and technician, we will piece together and compose a work that creates this unease that I speak of. Perhaps we will record sound from the forest. Perhaps from the mud and deadwater of the estuary. Cat works with sounds that are below our hearing range, entering our bodies through the skin, effecting us without us knowing. An encroaching claustrophobia that is beautiful too.
On leaving the work, your memory is uneasy, even though beyond the work, you have seen the panorama of the harbour. Beautiful. This happy disquiet, this sunlit unease. This is my home.