hope clouds observation (salt walk) - REMNANT 2021
in collaboration with sound artist Michele vescio
The wayfarer travels not across a territory but along it…
Over the duration of my 3-month residency at Sauerbier House, I approached my responding to a new environment within the context of two daily practices; the studying of writings on the natural world by zen buddhist priest, writer, poet and philosopher Dōgen and the investigation of the simple act of walking as a means of observational movement along a landscape rather than directional movement across it.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes a “gressive ontology” that distinguishes wayfaring from navigation…
”Wayfaring is a creative end in itself- a way of being in a mesh-worked world in which cognition is experienced palpably in and over the body. In navigation, by contrast, passages are merely transitions between points of a purpose defined network, where the human is reduced to a passenger, the path he or she follows a mere relay between stations.”
Every day I arrived at the studio, I would set out to walk as wayfarer rather than passenger. Sights were recorded through photographic documentation. Sounds were recorded and relayed through digital transmission to my longtime collaborator Michele Vescio who was stuck in lockdown in Melbourne.
In listening, could they walk with me? Can you?
The process and challenges of remote collaboration, with sound artist Michele under restrictive lockdown in Melbourne, further informed the work.
During the period in which La Fey was investigating and exploring her environment, Vescio was researching what creating sound during lockdown in a pandemic means, particularly focussing on what silence can sound like when we're not being distracted or overwhelmed.
Upon receiving the wayfaring audio recordings Vescio listened to each recording taking notes on what they perceived they were hearing and constructed a mental imagery through those sounds - placing themselves within these audio landscapes and imagining what was being sensed, felt, experienced between the sounds.
In exploring what rendered silence could sound like when not in states of distraction and how to deconstruct those sounds somewhat, the audio was not manipulated, retaining
an intrinsic connection to the site(s) they were collected, creating a sound work which is gentle and meditative, and yet deliberate in its correlation and in response to the sculptural installation works of La Fey - a thoughtful meditation that invites audiences to linger long enough to see silence.
Vescio’s sound work offers a minimal yet evocative layer of insight into La Fey’s research, thoughts, and artistic journey over the past three months, the sound artist likening it to an original soundtrack of Anastasia’s residency at Sauerbier House.
As our coastal environments are ever more severely impacted by climate change and human activity, can we find alternative ways to move across landscapes in more harmonious and empathetic movement? Are we able to understand that when stepping into a landscape we are not simply in transit across it but we have become part of it?
The wayfarer travels not across a territory but along it, part of the world’s restless coming into being:
the path of the wayfarer wends hither and thither, and may even pause here and there before moving on. But it has no beginning or end. While on the trail the wayfarer is always somewhere, yet every “somewhere” is on the way to somewhere else. The inhabited world is a reticulated meshwork of such trails, which is continually being woven as life goes on along them.
