Moving Image Works
Raise the Alarm is a deep listening and deep viewing programme of screen-based and audio works from interdisciplinary artists who make art in response to the natural world and the climate emergency.
Sounding Line still. Image by Rowan Aitchison.
Mella Shaw
Sounding Line is a project in two parts, a large-scale ceramic installation and a short film — screened here — both titled after the name given to a rope dropped from a boat to the seabed to measure depth at sea. This project exposes the overuse of marine sonar which is having a devastating effect on deep-diving whale species that rely on echolocation. Sonar is used by the military and by companies searching for new gas and old reserves to scan the seabed. With permission from Nature Scotland, Shaw has made her own clay body using bone-ash from the remains of a northern bottlenose whale beached on the west coast of Scotland (in much the same way that bone china is made using 40-60% cow bone). She then used this to make large-scale sculptural forms inspired by whales’ tiny inner-ear bones. For the installation Shaw wrapped these sculptures in red marine rope that was made to resonate with actual sonar pulse. Visitors were encouraged to touch the rope and thereby to feel the vibration travel through their bodies in a reflection of the lived experience of the whales. Shot on An Diorlinn beach on South Uist the film documents a journey Shaw made to return one of the unfired sculptural forms back into the sea in the Outer Hebrides where we eventually see it completely dissolve. Sounding Line was first shown at the British Ceramics Biennale, where it won the Award Prize (2023) and has been selected for the European Ceramic Context Triennial (2024) and the Korea Ceramic Foundation Biennale (2024).
Seals’kin still. Image courtesy of Hanna Tuulikki.
Hanna Tuulikki
Seals’kin is a sonic and choreographic meditation on loss, longing, transformation and kinship, shot on location in coastal Aberdeenshire. At the mouth of the river Ythan, where the freshwater meets the North Sea, hundreds of grey and common seals haul out on the estuary banks. Here, Hanna Tuulikki explores with her body what it might mean to become-with-seal, drawing on her own recent experiences of loss to reimagine a contemporary mourning rite. Referencing traditional selkie tales as bereavement allegories and seal calling songs as practices of making kin, she adopts the sealskin as a powerful ritual object to explore how grief can open out new ways of knowing and being that stretch beyond human bodies into a visceral connection with the more-than-human world. Seals’kin was commissioned for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), which focused on rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems as dynamic living systems.
DarkQuiet still. Image courtesy of Finding Our Voice.
DarkQuiet, courtesy of Finding Our Voice.
DarkQuiet Collective
Too bright. Too loud. Noise and the glare of spectacle are overwhelming for human and non-human alike. DarkQuiet seeks to refocus ways of experiencing the rich complexity and fragility of the world. DarkQuiet is a live audio-visual experience within a field of performance apparatus — calibrated to heighten our excitement for the subtle, the shadowy, the night sky, and the night sound. The experience depicted in this film — an overnight event in the grounds of Bundanon Art Museum & Bridge — allowed the audience to experience the quiet and the dark via a wayfinding exercise, that gave way to attunement spaces that were calibrated to the site of the Shoalhaven River and its bushland on the traditional lands of the Dharawal and Dhurga language groups. The installation invited audiences to attune to the crepuscular and the nocturnal, and to gather for a tranquil, experience walking a site at intervals during the evening and night. This film was produced by Finding Our Voice — a celebration of Australia in Sound and was shot during the premiere performance. The installation remained at Bundanon for a further three months.
Mìle Dorcha (The Dark Mile) still. Image courtesy of Ross Little.
Ross Little
Mìle Dorcha (The Dark Mile) is a portrait of Arkaig Community Forest in the West Highlands, a remnant of the ancient Caledonian pinewoods that is currently being ecologically transformed by both humans and non-humans. The film reveals this landscape to be an ever-changing site of conflicts and collaborations between plants, fungi, animals, machines and people, bringing into question exactly how and to what extent humans should intervene in an environment. Mìle Dorcha (The Dark Mile) is a film that asks whether we can ever understand the non-human world and our relationship to it from outside of a human perspective. In seeing the complex and entangled web of life that this forest embraces, we sense that humans are part of this story but by no means central to it. The humans may have the best intentions, but they are always overshadowed by the seething unbounded natural life that shapes this land.
Listening to Earth still. Image by Fausto Brusamolino.
Diana Chester, Fausto Brusamolino and Damien Ricketson
Originally devised as a sensory sound installation that invites audiences to listen and connect to their environment through sound, Listening to Earth is created by sound artist Diana Chester and composer Damien Ricketson with interactive visuals by Fausto Brusamolino. Listening to Earth is designed to reflect the changing sea levels of Australian coastal communities, and their interaction with the land. Drawing upon deep listening practices, the experience is intended to facilitate audiences hearing the earth in ways that sit beyond their usual modes of perception. The work engages with environmental concerns by positioning the earth as a store of vibrational memory and stories that, via an experience of heightened attentiveness, we may learn to better understand what it has to say. The artists thank the Sydney Environment Institute for their support.
It’s the Skin You’re Living In still. Image courtesy of Fevered Sleep.
David Harradine
It’s the Skin You’re Living In is a multi-format film project, that explores and challenges images of climate change. Shot in a series of locations from the islands of Svalbard in the High Arctic to a kitchen in a house in London — via the beaches and headlands of Barra and Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides, the M11 motorway, a dairy farm in Bedfordshire and the outskirts of Hackney and the Olympic Park — the project suggests that climate change isn’t a matter just concerning distant landscapes and threatened animals, but is an ever present part of everyone’s daily lives. Working across performance, film, installation, text and digital art, David Harradine is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Fevered Sleep. His work is research led and participatory, with art at the front of the process and people at the centre.