amby downs

I started with the idea of invitation and intrigue. With these words in mind, I imagined what it would be like for visitors to AGNSW to walk through transition spaces. I was on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung biik, the hot dry season had just finished, and during that time i captured various recordings of black field crickets making their mating songs, invitations for members of their species to come check them out, see if they’re agreeable to creating another generation together. When I made the recordings, I was relieved to be experiencing warm weather, and i was relieved to learn that the crickets are a native species. I was relieved that they had the opportunity to thrive and expand their genetic diversity, and I was relieved to feel held by Country. I pulled together these recordings, many of which featured bird song, snippets from the radio, sounds of my movements around the house, and spent hours sitting with them, listening, shaping and building something that is reflective of my need for groundedness, to communicate something to that effect to the audience. listening is a practice, and it leads to increased knowledge – about the environment you're in, about one’s self, and the interconnectedness of all things. As with all of my longform works, I find the creation process highly regulating; my fragile nervous system soothed when I work through what the sounds together mean to me, what order can be found in chaos. Loops of differing lengths cycle through and around each other, transporting the listener out of themselves and in to a way of perceiving World as that which is more than what we could ever understand within the confines of western societal norms. Grief and melancholy are woven in to this this work, created during a time when the world’s most brutal horrors are present every day in front of my eyes despite being thousands of kilometres away. The meditation in this work is one that rests on a deep longing for peace, for liberation. The invitation from the crickets is one to live in balance.