Resonate 2023 / Drawing Sound

2-26 February 2023

correspondences presents its inaugural ‘Resonate’ program, which focuses on the art of sound and its connection with other disciplines. 

Each year, one leading musician/composer is invited to respond to a poem, novel, painting, drawing, dance, play, or film that explores everyday spirituality and place, seeking out connections or resonances.

The program aims to foster artistic connections across disciplines while providing time and space for artists and audiences to reflect on a key aspect of the local, lived experience in the recent 12 months.

This year’s Resonate project, Drawing Sound, features multi-instrumentalist and composer Genevieve Fry and multi-disciplinary artist Jessye Wdowin-McGregor.

Featuring live music improvisation, video, drawing, collage and photography by Fry and Wdowin-McGregor, the project examines the art of sound, drawing and walking, the connection of these disciplines with our bodies and the experience of emotional resonance, healing and connectivity with our sense of place.

From 2-17 February, Genevieve will work in the gallery space, making and recording her distinctive music alongside a suite of new ‘sound drawings’.

Her starting point will be visual imagery and environmental sound recordings from Jessye’s video A Concrete Place, a poetic exploration of the everyday experience of walking along the Moonee Moonee (Moonee Ponds Creek) between COVID-19 lockdowns. The project also takes inspiration from Genevieve’s abstract sound drawings, a meditative fine art practice the artist developed coming out of the pandemic.

Each week, new musical collaborations/improvisations will take place onsite, and Genevieve will add sound drawings to the exhibition space. 

During this time, Jessye will explore the Birrarung (Yarra river), a continuation of her longstanding examination of urban waterways, place and the thresholds between body and landscape. She will return to the studio space onsite each week to research, make and collaborate.

From Tuesday to Saturday each week (2-17 February), audiences are welcome to join the artists onsite for daily improvised music, drawing and walking sessions. Participants are invited to submit a drawing for the exhibition in our guest book.

On Friday, 17 February, a finished suite of drawings by Genevieve and collages, photographs, video or research by Jessye was opened and will be displayed until Sunday, 26 February. The artists’ works will be available for sale.

Below you can find an image of each drawing made by Genevieve, along with a link to the corresponding ‘sound sketch’ released daily via Soundcloud along with a little more insight into the context/origins behind the project’s inception.

To explore Jessye’s work online, along with a small interview, press the button below.

As our project developed, we compiled a list of reading and listening content connected with the project's central ideas and experiences. Press this hyperlink to check out the list. It will remain here for you to return to if you like.

The sounds and images of this project made on the country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation.
We respectfully acknowledge them as the Sovereign Custodians of the land and waters upon which we live and work.
We pay our respect to their Elders, past, present and emerging. We extend this respect to all First Peoples.

Thank you, Ali McCann, for these beautiful installation photographs. Listen to an interview with Genevieve and Jessye talking about Drawing Sound on SmartArts with Oslo Davis on Triple R.

Sound Drawings & Sketches

Context / Origins for the project

The return to 'regular' life in the months since the COVID-19 lockdowns has been slow. 

After an extended period of flux, anxiety and forced separation from others, our audiences have talked with us about feeling isolated.

At the same time, they have also talked with us about feeling hesitant. Hesitant to engage, build new confidences, experiment or make commitments to spend time with others in person - preferring instead the comfort, safety and convenience of 'socialising' at home via screen-based technologies that make our experience of the everyday material world ephemeral, making language more than nature and the body the human environment.        

In this context, there is a need for healing and greater connectivity within our communities and ways to reconnect our minds with bodies and bodies with a sense of place and each other. 

This year's iteration of the Resonate project, Drawing Sound, responds to this need. After all, 'resonance' is the quality of a deep, full, and reverberating sound. While healing is the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again, conflating the notion of healing and the body with the art of sound and making. But why drawing?

'Drawing' is the art or activity of making drawings – be it a representation of an object, an outline of a figure, a plan, a sketch or indeed something abstract that uses colour or line to express an emotional resonance with a particular image, memory or emotion.  

There is an innate co-mingling of the word's definition, its use, and its association with the body that intrinsically expresses collective notions of being. To draw is to gently pull, guide or move something or someone in a particular way. We draw breath, a bath, and a pot of tea leaves to extract life, calm and flavour. 

There is a sense of steadiness, of careful revelation and sometimes, of ease in the way we draw. Objects and things, yes, but also subjects people and experiences. We draw people into a conversation that changes hearts and minds, just as we draw them into our confidence to reveal some hidden part of ourselves to them (and vice versa). 

In this human exchange, the art of sound is essential and revelatory. We draw sound from instruments and the world around us to feel a deep, full, reverberating connection, sense of presence (absence), and togetherness in this place. 

As the English art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger wrote in his essay, 'Some Notes About Song (For Yasmine Hamdan)':

A song when being sung and played acquires a body. And it does this by taking over and briefing possessing existent bodies. The body of the double bass standing vertical whilst it's being strummed, or the body of the mouth-organ cupped in a pair of hands hovering and pecking like a bird before a mouth, or the torso of the drummer as he rolls. Again and again, it takes over the body of the singer. And after a while, the body of the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song, are remembering and foreseeing.  

Berger explains that it is this act of coming together and sharing these experiences that help us feel less solitary, less alone. 

It's this sense of hope and connectivity with notions of everyday spirituality and place that the project aims to foster. Alongside this is the desire to create a space for building new confidence in drawing and listening collectively with greater self-awareness to the healing, restorative forces of sound around us, from nature to the world of music. 

Artist Bios