THE SHOP RESIDENCY
I was in partial lockdown for a week in Kandos at the shop-residency. I spent my time reading writing, drawing thinking, overheating, swimming, walking, a couple of incidental as well as organised meetings with towns people and generally just being in Kandos as an disconnected outsider. As an outsider one is given the opportunity to observe and see the town from a distance. The anonymity affords one the privilege of isolation to contemplate and become absorbed in the landscape of internal thoughts.
I worked upon a series of quick sketches for possible future artworks.
I installed 3 simple inter-related ideas in the shop windows. They explored how we may eavesdrop upon…
1. a conversation
2. lines in a book
3. the sub-conscious while asleep
THE SHOP WINDOWS
The sketches that resonated most engaged the windows as a membrane. This membrane between the inside and outside of the shop, acts as an acoustic diaphragm for listening to the muffled whispers—external sounds of the street or simply a place to ‘eavesdrop’ on the passing community. How do we decipher what is public and what is private?
In front of the residency shop window is a place for bumping into people and the sharing of words. The conversations slip in and out of local reference—speaking about the weather; how someone is feeling that day; about the how the kids are going at school; arrange a time to meet up in the future; about an elderly parent; complain about the weather…a place for simple promises of connectedness. This place or site directs and instigates the conversation between friends, neighbours, family, co-workers and the occasional stranger.
Outside the shop window is a place where communication is shaped by politeness, delight, coincidence, repetition – “echoing between local situation and the general shared spaces created amongst people and how they know one another.”(1)
LINE OF SIGHT
On entering and leaving the township of Kandos one is greeted by the iconic dome or rotunda. It is not a whispering dome but a landmark place for public and social meeting. The dome structure and the shop residency windows are line of sight, offering an opportunity to transmit wireless communication between the two sites.
(1)B. LaBelle, “Misplace-Dropping Eaves on Ethics.” Hearing Places, ed. by R. Bandt, M. Duffy& D. MacKinnon. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)