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
Dear Neighbour (2021 - Ongoing) is an exploration of my observations and contradictory feelings about community; my feelings of alienation, signs of this feeling in others, and our shared need for comfort and safety. The project examines physical, political, and social barriers that separate neighbours. It is an account of living among strangers, feeling unseen, and out of place. The barriers between us. Barriers we erect.
Through captured images, junkmail archives and social media message boards, this is a represention of Ringwood, Melbourne (Naarm), the suburb where I live. The project explores tension and estrangement in suburban Australia at a time when the impact of social, technological and environmental change challenges our collective psyche.
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.
Artist walk through video HERE
Soundscape notes – oddly.shaky.land by Peter Miller
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.