Since 2021, I have captured images and collected texts to reveal barely acknowledged undercurrents in Ringwood an outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia, at a time when the impact of social, technological and environmental change challenges our collective psyche. Dear Neighbour is an exploration of my perceptions of the suburban landscape. The expression of differing values between neighbours. My feelings of alienation and need for community.
Dear Neighbour is an account of the strangers who live around me. The neighbours I don’t yet know. The barriers between us. The barriers we erect. A visual and textual search for community. By bringing our shared tensions, contradictions and unease to the fore, I encourage viewers to ask themselves the same questions that I ask. Who is my neighbour? What does ‘a sense of community’ look like in the 21stC? In a world marked by global tensions, where the balance of our lives is continually disrupted by the unfamiliar, this project invites viewers to ponder the essence of neighbourliness, and the nature of human connection.
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.
