We are happy to introduce to you the work of Daisy Wells.
Dwellings is a work dedicated to sound’s materiality at its most intimate and delicate – in memory and nostalgia. It is both a reflection on lived aural experience, and an exploration of the layers, motions and textures which perpetual unfold in auditory imagination. In this work, sound and image are utilised strategically as a fleeting, intricate expression of remembered sonic experience. Wells’ collaging of sonic and visual material is careful, demonstrating a respect for sound’s affective and interactive potential, as well as its profound relationship with the visual. As the ambience of the soundscape unfolds, latent environmental connections float into and out of foreground and focus, bridging the gap between viewers senses and their surroundings, only to have them drift back into an imagined or remembered alternative.
In Wells’ work, sound is formless but by no means powerless. The audio-visual material of which Dwellings consists engages and blurs present and remembered experience. Re-echoing the sublimates of nature, Wells’ immersive audiovisual installation calls attention to the sonic surrounds, underscoring the way they live on, manifest in our recollection of times and places now past. Wells’ approach to listening is as a process which tones all perception; an attitude and metaphor; an effort to bind the sensitivity of active and intense observation to the everyday environment.
This potential of sound and listening as material is especially apparent in the way Wells harnesses it live in her ambient sound-collages, which evoke a conscious but nonetheless dream-like state. In contemplating the ordinary from a position of nostalgic familiarity, Wells’ field recordings, computer manipulations, and the exploratory improvisational attitude with which they are deployed, gesture to sound’s relation to subjective space of thought and memory, encouraging in listeners a state of increased mindfulness. In her performances, the act of listening is expressed in a way which heralds the possibility of an intimate conversation and potential abstraction, resolving in pairs of opposed feelings; comfort and discomfort; nostalgia and insecurity.
Daisy Wells is in her final year of an Honours degree at Elam School of Fine Arts. She also performs under the name Petrichor and will play on opening night.
Dwellings: An exhibition of work by Daisy Wells
Opens Thursday 7 April, 5.30pm, with refreshments provided by Liberty Brewing!
Gallery open 12 – 4pm, Tuesday – Saturday.
Closes Saturday 30 April 4.00pm.
Petrichor