[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?
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.
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
Does anyone know why there are helicopters overhead every night lately?
Since 2021, I have taken photographs which reflect my contradictory feelings about my home suburb in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia. In 2023 I began collecting messages from community social media noticeboards which suggest that others may feel as anxious or conflicted as I do. These photographs, which blend suburban documentary with text-based interventions drawn from social media, aim to externalize internal states of anxiety and estrangement.
On the surface Ringwood in 2025 is a lovely place, with lots of green spaces and newly developed facilities. I have come and gone from the area multiple times, influenced by the tumultuous forces of my life. First, briefly, when I was a toddler, while my unhappy parents lived in cheap rentals and my father moved from job to job. In the 1970s, as a 12-year-old in a family already devastated by domestic abuse, my brothers and I were uprooted from a country town to live here. It was meant to be a ‘fresh start’ move for my parents but was by design a more anonymous existence where neighbours would not know our history. That feeling of being unseen, unconnected, was not good for a lonely, self-conscious teenager. So, after enduring a horrible time at high school I escaped as soon as I could drive. There was a long exciting period living in artsy share houses in the inner suburbs and then overseas to an even larger city. But after a painful divorce in 2001, I found myself drawn back to Ringwood. It was a reluctant return to what I perceived to be the parochial backblocks. To live again with my mother, this time with my own two children. And again, to be starting over, scarred and feeling alone.
Yet, I am still here. Nowadays, I am happily remarried. The children have grown and left our lovely home, near bushland, birdlife, and conveniences. Still, neighbours mostly ‘keep to themselves’. It is a more conservative area than I feel comfortable with, and I cannot shake a sense of it being a place of traumatic memory.
Dear Neighbour, is an account of living among strangers, feeling unseen, and out of place. I am interested in how trauma is encoded in suburban streetscapes—fences, thresholds, signage, or absences where connection might otherwise be.
More broadly, the project explores signs and symbols of tension and estrangement in suburban Australia at a time when the impact of social, technological and environmental change challenges how we live together, how we see each other, and what we call community.
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 notes – 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.
