River Wunderground

Hi Backpagers,
My name is Jessica Coughlan, Studying at Uni Newcastle, I am currently brainstorming a new area of Peats Ridge Festival that i am calling River Wunderground. I would like to invite local artists to create work in response to themes of river as a sustainable ecosystem, or simply, river, as well as the "wunderground", as an extension of the wunderkammer or curiosity cabinet, but a land focused on the curiosities of the world of the underwater. I know that it is short notice, but I am looking for expressions of interest for grant applications. The festival is not until the coming New Year, but the major funding bodies require documents now. if you

have any questions, please call me anytime on 0431 684741. The River Wunderground will also feature Performance artists from the Pork Productions collective in Sydney as well as Members of the Lovelorn Living Party in Newcastle. If you are not aware of the festival, please visit our site at www.peatsridgefestival.com.au this is an opportunity that i am making exclusively to your group as local installation artists making contemporary and temporary works with an interest in space, place and ecology. Please consider my offer and respond by phone if possible before Thursday 15th February.
Thank you for your consideration of my request.
Jessica Coughlan

Alison Clouston and Boyd

Those of you who remember the great work of Alison and Boyd at the Dawn Light Symposium will be interested to know that they will be back in the region at the Peats Ridge Festival.

The following, forwarded to The Back Page, is the text for a sign relating to their installation planned for the festival:

“Body of Water.”
Boyd, sound artist and Alison Clouston, visual artist

Water moves through our bodies and the landscape in a network of creeks, veins, rivers, and arteries. Get yourself eavesdropping on the secret hydrology of the river and our own bodies -– we are ourselves at least 70% water.

Try the headphones provided in the little coracles, or circular boats, drawn up on the riverbank, and you can listen through the hydrophone – a microphone under the water. Or place the landed hydrophone on your own belly and listen.

You might pick up the mysterious sounds and signs of life and health in body and water – the clicks and whirrs of fish, turtles, and macro-invertebrates, and the strange and funny music of the human innards.

The flotilla of small vessels carries the hydrophone out to the depths of the water: Like us, adrift, and vulnerable to the currents of change.

Alison Clouston and Boyd
Visual artist Alison Clouston and sound artist Boyd have been collaborating on sound and sculpture installations for twenty years, exhibiting in the national and international context. Their engagement with environmental issues, and their work with Landcare in the Southern Highlands of NSW where they live provoked their recent projects about Sydney’s water crisis, “Adrift” for Murray Darling Palimpsest 2006, and “Wake” and “Potamology” shown at the Gosford Regional Gallery last year.

Documentation of more of their work can be found on their Burragorang website.