[Loneliness] …feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City 2016
… a neighbour is primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when it comes too close …
Slavoj Zizek, Violence 2009
Did anyone just see the massive meteor in the sky a few moments ago?
What’s with all the motorcycles and the bloke on the loud speaker?
Good evening, hate having to post this, but I'm needing some pretty urgent food help due to some personal things going on. Any help/suggestions would be so helpful right now. Thank you
3 fire trucks just roared past me in Bedford road. Sounds ominous.
Does anyone know what the deal with new st ring wood is? Everytime I walk past there is a lot of dodgy looking people that seem to be looking shifty, rubbish dumped everywhere and aggressive yelling sometimes coming from some of the houses?
What security camera options are available for a property with no wi-fi?
Anyone have a spareroom as im homeless and sleeping in my car and can't get a house anywhere I dont care where it is as I have drive all over for work
A man was captured on our cam tonight crouched over our front steps. We zoomed in on what he was doing and he was holding a tape measure on the steps.
Does anyone know why there are helicopters overhead every night lately?
Since 2021, I have explored my perceptions of the suburban landscape through street photography. Along the way I began to collect quotes from social media community groups and junk mail texts. At the same time, I have been reading philosophical writings on the various ways that loneliness can be experienced, and how alienation easily transitions to expressions of hostility. Through images and words my humble urban neighbourhood began to reveal subtle undercurrents of collective estrangement. Dear Neighbour is an account of neighbours who remain strangers and the ways that disconnection is encoded in suburban streetscapes. The sadness of absences where connection might otherwise be.
The project explores signs and symbols of tension and estrangement in urban life at a time when social, technological and environmental challenges affect how we live together, how we see each other, and what we call community. When the digital world is dominated by rising tensions, and the balance of our daily lives is continually disrupted by the unfamiliar, this project invites viewers to ponder the passing of neighbourliness, and IRL connection. By bringing both personal and shared tensions, contradictions and unease to the fore, I ask: Who is my neighbour?
The first iteration of Dear Neighbour was exhibited at Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, Ringwood, Dec 2023 - Jan 2024. The installation included a backdrop of shopping centre shadows printed onto industrial screening mesh, scattered junkmail and Facebook community noticeboard quotes. It also included a beautiful soundscape by my partner, Peter Miller, which you may hear on the artist walk through video HERE
Soundscape oddly.shaky.land by Peter Miller Peter says about this work:
My sound work 'oddly.shaky.land' is created from multiple recordings I've collected of the ambient background noise in two specific locations: the Ringwood Eastlink underpass and the Eastland shopping complex, places that I find myself passing through on an almost daily basis.
Even though those of us who live in cities hear this kind of ubiquitous ambience all the time, we mostly don’t notice it due to our brain's remarkable ability to filter it from our awareness. To emphasise the unique qualities of these soundscapes, I’ve layered the recordings of each location multiple times to distil their essence, and then ‘played’ the resulting sound blends as if they were musical instruments. Framing them in a musical manner like this allows me to re-discover them in terms of their purest form, a kind of hollow swirling that evokes a spectral nostalgic sense of motion. To accentuate these inherent qualities, I've added sparse melodic instrumentation of a more conventional nature.