Dear Neighbour is an exploration of my perceptions of the suburb where I live. My own feelings of alienation, signs of this feeling in others, and our communal need for comfort and safety. The project examines the physical, political, and social barriers that separate neighbours, and small efforts made to overcome them. It is an account of the strangers who live around me, in a neighbourhood where I feel out of place. The barriers between us. Barriers we erect. A visual and textual search for community.
Since 2021 I have captured images, and created archives from junk mail and social media to represent my neighbourhood of Ringwood, an outer suburb of Melbourne. The resulting project reveals barely acknowledged undercurrents of tension in suburban Australia at a time when the impact of social, technological and environmental change challenges our collective psyche.
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.