Shape of an Echo (2019) by Fayen d’Evie, Anna Seymour, and Pippa Samaya, and Hauntings (HM Castlemaine)’ by Andy Slater are paired video and sound works that place blindness and Deafness in creative conversation. The paired works were orginally conceived as part of a hybrid artist-curatorial project, Dustcloud, which was planned to be installed throughout the Old Castlemaine Gaol as a feature exhibition of the Castlemaine State Festival 2019. 

The Old Castlemaine Gaol was built in the 1800s, one of a network of prisons with a radial, star-like architecture designed to control deviant citizens, through surveillance, segregation, seclusion, and enforcement of silence. Dustcloud would have inverted such sensory segregation by inviting visitors to experiment with navigating the exhibition and gaol architecture via sensory scores. Dustcloud would have included vibrational sculptures, sonic and subsonic works, tactile and auditory paintings, choreographic video works, gestural poetry, and performance works, enfolding collaborative contributions from eleven artists from Australia, the US, and the UK.

A few months before the exhibition was programmed to open, the Old Castlemaine Gaol was sold to a private buyer. Unable to proceed with the original site, a remnant exhibition, From Dust to Dust, was installed as a hallucinatory echo of the Dustcloud, across two rooms of another historic site, the Old Castlemaine Hospital. In a cramped room previously used for storing medicine and supplies, ‘Hauntings (H M Castlemaine)’ by Andy Slater was mounted, a composition of field recordings of the atrium, corridors, cells, and dungeon of the Old Castlemaine Gaol. Slater is the founder of the Society for Visually Impaired Sound Artists. The wayfinding echoes of Slater’s mobility cane are prominent within the sound work, as are his encounters with the resonant bell bronzes of sculptor Aaron McPeake, which had been installed in a cloud down one of the corridors of the Gaol during the Dustcloud development. McPeake is also blind. He is based in London at Chelsea School of Art, which rests on the site of Millbank, another historic radial prison where convicts were held before being transported to Australia. McPeake’s vibrational bell bronzes ‘Resonant Cuts’, carried to Castlemaine from Millbank, were installed across the two rooms, while in the hallway, Will Kollmorgen presented an oratory skipping performance that refigured the absent exhibition as percussive myth.

In the second room across the hallway, a larger space previously occupied by ward in-patients, the video Shape of an Echo (2019) was installed: a collaboration with Deaf dancer Anna Seymour and videographer Pippa Seymour, which we had filmed at a third historic radial prison, HM Bendigo. The video translates Slater’s sonic work into gestural poetics, choreographed and performed by Seymour. Though emanating from Seymour's native language Auslan, the poetics have been crafted by Seymour to allow the potential for the video to be read by an international audience. Auslan interpreter Ilana Gelbart and Deaf artist Jaycob Campbell contributed to the translation process. The redescription of sounds into gestural language inverts the accessibility trope of audiodescription, where visual works are described for blind audiences.

Video work (13.15 minutes)

A parallel commission to Hauntings (2019), a sound work by Andy Slater

From Dust to Dust, Castlemaine State Festival, 22 - 31 March 2019

Finalist, Incinerator Art for Social Change Award 2019