SymbioticA

PERDITA PHILLIPS: The Sixth Shore

FURTHER INFORMATION

Country of origin

Australia

Website:

https://www.perditaphillips.com

Perdita Phillips, cusp (The Sixth Shore), 2012, floor sound work 300 x 300 cm
Sponsor: Australia Council for the Arts

 

BiographyPERDITA PHILLIPS

 

Perdita Phillips is a Western Australian artist working across the media of walking, sound, installation, photography and digital media. Through her work she explores the mutual relationships between people and the nonhuman world. Exhibitions include In Vetland (solo, Murdoch University 2009), Home Open, (Fremantle Arts Centre 2010-2011) and Visceral: The Living Art Experiment, (Science Gallery, Dublin 2011). As founder and co-editor of Lethologica Press she has designed, contributed and published various books including A simple rain (with Vivienne Glance 2012) and The Estrildid Orchestra (with Thea Costantino 2012) and birdlife (various authors 2011).


THE SIXTH SHORE


The Sixth Shore is a site-specific spatial sound installation for Lake Clifton. It introduces people to the soundscapes of the natural world that we normally ignore and investigates the pressing problem of how to bring together different stories and perspectives about a complex environmental issue. The work involves six refrains:
• thrombolitic time
• shifting shores: lake formation and seashore changes
• cultivated landscapes: indigenous cultures
• a time of clearing
• bird migration and hooded plovers
• futures
The six strands of sound are woven together, challenging the participants to think through the conceptual ‘interference’ of different levels of time and space.

Presented at the gallery is a small sampling of the soundtrack and documentation of the installation at Lake Clifton. In this work, beach cusp sound moves through different speakers in a sequence similar to the way waves come up a beach before washing back out into the sea.

Explanation for the formation of beach cusps remains inconclusive and may involve the formation of standing edge waves or, alternatively, can be understood as a paradigm of self organisation or as an analogy for how we may reset our environmental and cultural priorities.