Residency at Bundanon

Residency at Bundanon

In May 2012, Darragh and David undertook a residency at the Bundanon Trust. During the residency, Team D scoped the distinct elements of APHASIA and began collecting extensive recordings of text, whispers, declamations, breathing, heartbeats, along with more conventional musical timbres of percussion and piano.

Bundanon is a special place – a place that affords artists space and time to consider, reconsider, create, deconstruct, expand, concentrate and realise. For us, it was a time of uninterrupted creative flow, where Darragh worked on testing a range of materials, where David worked on sound design and music composition, and the wholistic experience of APHASIA was framed. 

    Darragh sketching at Bundanon

We would like to thank the Bundanon Trust for the great opportunity of being resident in the Musician’s Cottage. A creative space of peace, tranquility and no interruptions. http://www.bundanon.com.au/

Musician's Cottage at Bundanon

While there, we made the significant step of determining each of the discrete elements of APHASIA and established the conditions and meanings of their co-relation.  This will form the basis of subsequent blog entries as we explore the whole installation, then the process of making each discrete part.

    David's workstation at Bundanon

To the fantastic team at Bundanon – a heartfelt thank you; our residency was a game-changer in the way we had time to experiment and argue the finer points of the APHASIA: to create work, then pull it apart and start again, to build on creative successes and breakthroughs, and work through and reconsider creative failures – all such important aspects of conceptualising, making and doing.

One of the great highlights was the opportunity to record (and re-record) all of the text that we are using as raw material for APHASIA. This is powerful and highly personal and intimate material: letters written to Darragh by her father, and recollections of Darragh’s eclectic dreams. In bringing these two bodies of text together, there is a collision of meaning, of perspective, of function, and of reality that underscores the concept at the heart of APHASIA.

One of the most compelling dreams related by Darragh in APHASIA is reproduced here, along with her drawing of the dream…

I'm halfway up the bed on a mattress that is half see-through. There's a big rat underneath me. A white one. The bed is out in the garden, not far from the trampoline, beside the trees...

Rat under bed - a depiction of the dream by Darragh