Conversation Piece (2021)
Installation views at Bus Projects, Melbourne (2021). Sculptural and audiovisual installation in collaboration with Edwina Stevens: Pine, stoneware ceramic and glazes, adhesives, acrylic paint, speakers, projectors, speaker cables, 2-channel video and multi-channel audio soundscape. Dimensions Variable. Photos: Cristo Crocker/Edwina Stevens. Installation views at Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne (2021). Collaborative 2-channel video with seperate audio (video 1 12:30-min/ video 2 11:30-min/ audio 27-min; length of all 3 components vary, loop and intersect continuously). Photos: Edwina Stevens.
‘Conversation Piece’ is a collaborative sculptural and audiovisual work between Carly Fischer and Edwina Stevens that investigates interconnected dialogues between the artists material methodologies in response to questions of contemporary environmental engagement. The work extends the artists' interrogation of place-responsive practices, exploring how more open and collaborative encounters with environments might create alternate narratives that question broader colonial perspectives. The collaboration draws on Edwina's audiovisual piece 'Neve' of a white-out on Te Moeka o Tuawe glacier, Aotearoa, where the shifting visibility and audibility of the glacial environment opened up unexpected audiovisual dialogues with the place. In conversation with this piece, the artists filmed and audio-recorded Carly wheel-throwing clay during Melbourne's lockdown, where they were forced into a similar intimacy with place and materiality. In the installation, sonic and visual fragments slip between contexts; ice cracking merges with the sound of clay being formed; the drone of the wheel merges with the storm on the Neve. The work was presented both as an expansive installation of sculptural-acoustic ceramic vessels, sculptural screens and audiovisual feedback loops (Bus Projects) and as a 2-channel video/audio work (Incinerator Gallery), where sculptural, audio and video components were offset and looping independently to form constantly alternating perspectives. Through its shifting and intersecting dialogues between sculptural, video and audio fragments across contexts, ‘Conversation Piece’ explores how creating more collaborative, generative conversations with places might shift political and environmental awareness.