[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
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
I'm looking at putting up something on top of trellis
to stop my crazy bored neighbour annoying us and vandalizing trees
Wondering what places you can go to locally where you can go, sit
and simply feel safe when home life just gets too much
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
Woman who was on Eastlink bridge looking vulnerable
and had police attend. I'm here if you want a friend
Moving to ... st in couple of weeks …. Is it ok??? No
trouble hoons junkies or riff raff I hope
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
To the man with the agressive Pit bull in the lake park. Your dog
is going to attack children and other dogs. It was already menacing the ducks
What
security camera options are available for a property with no wi-fi?
Keep your kids close and keep an eye out for this
creep!!
Does anyone know why there are helicopters overhead
every night lately?
Did
anyone feel that Earthquake?
I am just wondering, does anybody know this man the one in the white hat his name is Peter
Did anyone just see the massive meteor in the sky a few moments ago?
I am just wondering, does anybody know this man the one in the white hat his name is Peter
Did anyone just see the massive meteor in the sky a few moments ago?
Maybe you need to rephrase that.
Not sure what you are asking
What's your point?
Why does everyone keep caring so much about this?
Does anyone know what the deal with ... st 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?
This morning around 9.30 there was a man throwing rocks at moving cars, didn't say anything, seemed very calm and completely detached. Very strange. The police were called
Seriously. The world must be so hard for you live in if this is such a big deal
Any ideas where i can find a justice of peace today? Urgent please
Suspicious man tried to lure our dog through our back
gate. Wearing high vis and driving a ford stationwagon
During periods of feeling alone — isolated from the people who live around me — I walked the suburban landscape with my camera, searching for an elusive sense of community. My experience as a single mother working long hours and commuting to a distant suburb made me acutely aware of how easily isolation can occur despite physical proximity to others. Conversations with my elderly mother and with neighbours who are immigrants, widows, carers, in disfunctional relationships, living with health challenges or simply living alone revealed the diverse and often hidden forms of loneliness shaping suburban life.
Turning to online neighbourhood communities, I became attentive to the ways my neighbours reach out to strangers through social media — through tentative or assertive posts, coded requests for help, expressions of frustration, and small gestures of care. Yet when digital communication replaces embodied interaction it diminishes our capacity to tolerate differences and to feel empathy for one another.
Photographing visual traces of anonymous inhabitants and gathering fragments of conversations shared between people unknown to one another led to this project. Beneath the surface of an unexceptional urban neighbourhood, I sensed undercurrents of collective estrangement. I was not alone in feeling alone.
Dear Neighbour examines how disconnection is encoded in suburban streetscapes and in the disembodied voices of digital exchange. Through the interplay of image and text, the work traces signs of isolation and estrangement at a time when technology mediates how we live together and how we interact with one another.
Turning to online neighbourhood communities, I became attentive to the ways my neighbours reach out to strangers through social media — through tentative or assertive posts, coded requests for help, expressions of frustration, and small gestures of care. Yet when digital communication replaces embodied interaction it diminishes our capacity to tolerate differences and to feel empathy for one another.
Photographing visual traces of anonymous inhabitants and gathering fragments of conversations shared between people unknown to one another led to this project. Beneath the surface of an unexceptional urban neighbourhood, I sensed undercurrents of collective estrangement. I was not alone in feeling alone.
Dear Neighbour examines how disconnection is encoded in suburban streetscapes and in the disembodied voices of digital exchange. Through the interplay of image and text, the work traces signs of isolation and estrangement at a time when technology mediates how we live together and how we interact with one another.
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 shadowy figures printed onto industrial screening mesh, with 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
Peter says about his soundscape:
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.
