Sounding through Touch

by CINDY YUEN-ZHE CHEN

This journal contribution includes images, video and sound recordings created through my interactions with the ochre, sounds, soil and waters of Golden Gully, Hill End in Wiradyuri Country. I acknowledge and pay my respects to the Traditional Owners of this place, the Wiradyuri people and their Elders past, present and emerging; they never ceded sovereignty of their lands and waters. I am deeply grateful for the cultural guidance and generous permission provided by Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises in my use of cultural resources from their Country. I recognise that as 'Traditional Owners, Elders and Cultural Practitioners who "speak for Country" in the Bathurst and O'Connell Plains area of the wider Wiradyuri Nation' (Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises),¹ they retain ownership of their cultural resources. Please click here to view their letter of support.

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Sounding through Touch - After Rain Excerpt, 2018, sound feedback composition, duration 5mins 18secs.

Sounding through Touch, 2018, still from process video.

Sounding through Touch, 2018, process image.

Sounding through Touch - Paper Mediators, 2018, ochre gravel and ink on Chinese paper, dimensions variable (approx. H50 x W90 x D50cm).

Introduction

The channeled pathway of Golden Gully in Hill End is quiet until the broken quartz and gravel underfoot is sounded by footsteps. The flies drone unceasingly in the heat of December and occasionally punctuate the cooler air of March. Walking between the walls of the gully situates me below the road to Mudgee; the occasional rumble of cars in the distance and the rustle of gum trees growing on the higher ground is audible overhead. I find that the contact between my body and the surfaces of soft ochre, hard quartz and crushed gravel alert me to my own emplacement.

The area of Hill End is home to the First People² of the Wiradyuri nation.³ It was drastically altered by European and Chinese gold miners during the nineteenth century and made iconic in Australian visual culture by painters such as Russell Drysdale in the twentieth century.⁴ The gouged tunnels of Golden Gully resonate with the tensions between these interlaced histories, and angled cuts in the land evidence the damage inflicted to the land and people by the gold mining industry. In choosing to interact with Golden Gully by touching and listening to the materiality of ochre, water and gravel, I responded to the actions of people who had shaped this place before me and reflected upon how my gestures enacted a specific dialogue with Golden Gully in the present moment.

Sounding through Touch is a collection of sound feedback compositions, paper 'mediators' and video works that emerged from interactions undertaken in March 2018 within the largest mining tunnel of Golden Gully. These works contributed towards a doctoral research project that explored how listening and sounding could extend drawing as a multi-sensory, embodied and emplaced practice. This article focusses upon how experimental processes of drawing with sound feedback enabled me to engender distinct perceptual experiences of Golden Gully that were particular to the characteristics of my body and the unique atmospheric and material contingencies of this place. I examine how my interconnected practices of listening, drawing and sounding were deeply inflected by my cultural, social and political context. Through the progression of these insights, I developed a deeper understanding of the impact of my actions and the ways that they wove another thread of my contemporary experience as a non-First Nations person into the complex layers of this place located within Wiradyuri Country.

As a Malaysian-Chinese artist who grew up in Australia, my methods of listening, sounding and drawing combine my knowledge of traditional Chinese painting practices and sound recording tools, theoretical influences from my Western-centric educational pathway and the learned cultural behaviours of my body. These influenced the ways that I interacted with Golden Gully, affected how I perceived this place and initially precluded a consideration of the cultural significance of working with material from the land. This article examines the specificity of my methodologies and the ways in which they facilitated and limited my understanding. These critical reflections enabled me to trace my unfolding awareness of the deep connection that Wiradyuri people continue to practice with the living materiality of their Country. In doing so, I came to understand that listening, drawing and sounding within places in Australia entails respectful dialogues with First Nations people and their continuing cultural and social practices.

Sounding through Touch - Process, 2018, process video, duration 1min 45secs.

Sounding through Touch

Midday sounding at the spot where the tunnel bends and there is a distinct edge in the jutting overhang of the ceiling. Faced east. Faint echoes and reverberations are quite beautiful...Curves, the sounds reflecting back to me are curved.

Golden Gully, 07/03/18

The invisible line of listening...An awareness of presence and agency of self is activated by my touch, by sounding and re-sounding.

Golden Gully, 18/03/18

In my processes of drawing and listening as interactions with Golden Gully, 'sounding' became both a form of measure and a production of sound: sounding to take a measure of where and how I was situated in these places, by listening to the sounds that my interactions generated. Early on in my research this sounding occurred close to and within my body, amplified by microphones attached to my wrists and lodged in my earbuds. When speakers were added to my equipment in March 2018, sounding extended beyond my body into the mining tunnel of Golden Gully which added complex layers of overlapping feedback and reciprocity.

The intimate, enclosed space of Golden Gully's mining tunnel provided possibilities for me to play with sonic reflections against the walls and low ceiling. Sounds from my hands touching damp Chinese paper, ochre, gravel and rainwater were recorded through microphones, then amplified and emitted through speakers into the tunnel. The scrapes, scrunches and squelching that emerged from this process returned to me from the tunnel walls, which I located by gesturing with microphones taped to my wrists. Intersecting these sounds with my gestures allowed me to 'draw' the arc of my arm's movement with 'lines' of sound feedback. In doing so, I sounded out how I was positioned in relation to the walls and rocks of this place.

I considered this process as Sound Feedback Drawing, however, unlike the visible accretion of marks on solid, flat surfaces, the ephemeral Sound Feedback Drawing process had no persisting reference point. Instead, the proximity, direction and velocity of a gesture intersecting with the sounds bounced back by the mining tunnel walls, determined the length, volume and timbre of the unfolding line of sound that was created. This process required me to search for 'sweet spots' ---sonic focal points in sections of the tunnel---where the sound waves from both speakers converged at locations where I could 'catch' them with the microphones attached to my wrists. Finding these convergence points and playing with the feedback, required me to constantly shift positions and to move my entire body with sweeps and twists of my arms. These movements produced microtonal shifts, shaping the sound feedback and my listening experience through gesture. This gestural motion of drawing created a resonant loop between my body and the tunnel to facilitate a dynamic search for how my body could move within the tunnel's confines.

The process of drawing connections between my body and the mining tunnel as a way of tuning into my perceptual emplacement occurred in two stages. Firstly, through an exploration of surfaces using my fingers, which created a sounding that enabled me to reaffirm the touch through active listening and gesture. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues that "to sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself: it is not only, for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved into vibrations that both return to itself and place it outside itself" (Nancy 8). He draws correlations with a notion of self-awareness through sensing, which "is always a perception (...) a feeling-oneself-feel (...) it is perhaps in the sonorous register that this reflected structure is most obviously manifest" (Ibid.). Nancy approaches listening through the sounding body, arguing that self-awareness is engendered through inherent resonance.⁵

Nancy's notion of the 'sonorous body' provides a valuable analogy for understanding the way that I used recording technology to extend and transfigure my sense of self awareness in the mining tunnel. In sounding with microphones and speakers, I created a sonorous, amorphous kind of instrument located between my body and the curves and gaps of the mining tunnel walls. Sending sounds into the environment of Golden Gully expanded the resonant space of my listening body so that I was touching surfaces with fingertips of sound that bounced back to me in diffused and fragmented hums, purrs and squeals. I responded to this reflected sonority of the mining tunnel with dynamic and immediate gestures, and in doing so 'felt-myself-feel' through sounding and listening.

Concurrent with this process were my reactions to the fluid contingencies of Golden Gully that shaped the sounds of my gestures in ways beyond my control. In addition to the sounds I created through touching surfaces, the microphones and speakers were also activated by wind blowing through the tunnel, bird calls and dripping pools of rainwater. Responding to these atmospheric, material and acoustic contingencies enabled me to engage in a dialogue with Golden Gully as a place that was alive and changing. These interactions entangled my sensations of touch and listening with the surfaces and acoustic qualities of Golden Gully, so that my awareness of my body's location and movement was expanded, layered and shaped by the vitality of the tunnel. By extending the sounding potential of my touch and gestures into Golden Gully, my perceptual experience of this place was transformed through these processes of relation.

Some Specificities of Listening

Listening is an active experience of testing surface and ground with the body. Listening to self in space, emplaced.

Golden Gully, 23/03/18

Within the mining tunnel of Golden Gully, I preferred to crouch close to the ground in order to interact with the gravel, ochre and water more intimately. I possessed the capacity to do so for long periods of time as I had spent years emulating the women in our family as they worked at home. My preference for crouching is a learned behaviour that emerged from my cultural experiences in Malaysia and is a bodily practice that continues to influence the ways that I move and relate to places in Australia. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz argues for the "sociocultural conceptions of the body'" as a strategy for examining the role of "sexual difference" in women's production of knowledge. Grosz asserts that "these differences must in some way be inscribed on and experienced by and through the body" (Grosz 31-32). Although Grosz makes a case for the particularity of women's experiences, I assert that the social and cultural specificities that shape bodily experiences can be true of any practice that produces knowledge. In my case, crouching to work close to the ground was a comfortable and familiar bodily position that guided the development of my listening, sounding and drawing methodologies and tools, affecting the ways that I saw, listened and touched Golden Gully. In the following, I discuss the development of these methodologies and tools and the inherent partialities within their conception.

The tools that I used in Sounding through Touch were chosen and designed in response to progressive interactions with Golden Gully and my body's preferences and capacities. The Chinese paper scrolls that I used to mediate interactions between my hands and ochre, gravel and rainwater, were a maximum 180cm in length, making them easy to manoeuvre within my arm span. I had previously drawn on Chinese paper scrolls for over a decade and in the context of Sounding through Touch, I found their softness to be more empathetic to my movements than heavy watercolour paper. Their highly absorbent nature created a thin, skin-like membrane when I dipped them in pools of rainwater and rubbed them in gravel. This membrane acted as a mediator whose textural characteristics transformed my tactile and auditory perception of the surfaces of Golden Gully. The squelches, drips and scrapes produced by touching gravel, ochre and water through Chinese paper created a listening experience in Golden Gully that was particular to the interactions between these materials, which differed from touching these surfaces with my hands alone.

Working with paper while crouching on the ground literally grounded my experience of embodied listening, emphasising my physical involvement within the sonic vitality of this place. Similarly, the small omnidirectional microphones, portable recorder and speakers that I had specifically selected for their compact size and minimum weight were not only a practical decision, but deliberately shaped how I listened within the mining tunnel. In a sound masterclass in early 2016, I learnt that sound artist and academic Philip Samartzis travelled with almost twenty kilograms of audio equipment to record sounds in Antarctica.⁶ I realised that I was not able to physically carry this weight and that my approach to listening centered upon the relationships between my body and places, and not the creation of expansive and spatially encompassing soundscapes.

Rather than mounting microphones on upright stands or attached to handles and mounts, they were taped on my wrists and closely integrated with the movements of my body to generate a way of listening that responded to my proximity to the ground. Crouching down within the tunnel of Golden Gully to generate sound feedback by gesturing my arms low within the trajectory of sound, constructed a listening experience that obscured distant sounds and amplified the immediate sounds produced by my hands. In this regard, the experiences of embodied listening that emerged from my interactions with Golden Gully were specific to the characteristics of my body, the contingent qualities of this place and my drawing, listening and sounding methodologies and tools.

The audition enhancing microphones, motion amplifying speakers and paper were constructed tools with distinct characteristics that altered my relationships with the material contingencies of Golden Gully. Contemporary artist and writer Salomé Voegelin asserts that "listening is a sensory-motor action toward the world, which thus is the crossing not the crossed. Hearing is participle and generative, creating the world and the things continuously in all their vitality from my moving within and toward myself also" (Voegelin 106). Voegelin emphasises the fluid and dynamic entanglement that occurs between a listener and the world that they generate through their intrinsic agency. The tools that I used enhanced my senses of touch and hearing, altered spatial awareness and deepened my consciousness of bodily endurance to complicate and reconfigure my relationship with this place. The methods of embodied listening that I developed in Sounding through Touch foregrounded the agency of my body and the deliberate manipulation of my responses to the material and atmospheric qualities of this place.

An important influence upon my understanding of my perceptual agency within Golden Gully is the enactive approach to perception proposed by Fransisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in 1991.⁷ Rather than the orthodox view of perception whereby the brain creates an internal representation of environmental information from sensory receptors (Noë and Thompson 2-3), proponents of the enactive approach such as Evan Thompson assert that:

"cognition is the exercise of skilful know-how in situated and embodied action (...) a cognitive being's world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being's autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment" (Thompson 13).

The enactive approach considers the body's relationship to the environment as a vital facilitator of perception, where an individual's choices and actions in responding to their surroundings shapes their unfolding perceptual experiences. This notion has been generative for me in considering how microphones, speakers and paper allowed my body's sensory 'modes of coupling' to enact particular ways of experiencing Golden Gully, and to create a distinct perceptual world that was fluid and dynamic. Recognising my role in enacting a particular experience of Golden Gully was vital in prompting me to examine the significance of cultural and social influences upon my constructed modes of embodied listening.

Learning to Listen with Care

In bringing my methods of listening, sounding and drawing to Golden Gully, I brought an approach that was inflected by my cultural, social and political context. The influence of European and North American contemporary artists, philosophers and writers such a Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Grosz, Salomé Voegelin and Evan Thompson upon my practice of embodied listening point to my Western-centric educational pathway, which was specific to me as a migrant Malaysian-Chinese artist who was brought up in Australia. Furthermore, the tradition of drawing that my listening and sounding methodologies extended upon, which propagates the notions of surface, gesture, line and mark-making, is also inherently Western in its theoretical discourse and practice.⁸ These ideas, the learned cultural behaviours of my body and the Chinese paper and recording tools, combined to generate an approach to Golden Gully that was highly partial to the ways I chose to listen, sound and draw. My relationship and interactions with Golden Gully were deeply shaped not only by the preferences and capacities of my body, but also by the theoretical underpinnings that informed my interpretation of these relations.

In her critique of the mediating nature of scientific technologies of visualisation, writer Donna Haraway argues that "all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing" (Haraway 58-59). Although Haraway speaks specifically of visual technologies such as microscopes, cameras and satellite surveillance systems, her argument resonates with the ways that I chose to use omnidirectional microphones, speakers and paper to extend and enhance my arms and ears. Haraway asserts that "the knowing self is partial in all its guises (...) it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly" (Ibid., 61). Haraway's argument foregrounds the importance of recognising the inherent biases and constructs within our ways of knowing and relating to the world around us.

I interpreted Haraway's deeply multifaceted text as a call for accountability and realised that in my processes of making Sounding through Touch, I generated an understanding of Golden Gully that was limited by my body, tools and theoretical notions. These limitations in my cultural, bodily and theoretical knowledge initially precluded a deeper understanding of the significance of interacting with the materiality of Wiradyuri Country as a non-First Nations artist. I did not immediately recognise that in using ochre to mark paper during my interactions with Golden Gully, I was appropriating an important cultural resource of the people of the Wiradyuri nation. It was only through my encounters with the artworks and practices of Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi, Wiradjuri artist Nicole Foreshew and Kuninjku artist John Mawurndjul, that I began to understand the important connections to Country that First Nations artists continue to practice through their artistic processes. In Dorothy Napangardi's practice, the acts of 'singing, dancing, painting up' were intimately connected with 'making' her Jukurrpa⁹ and her Country of Mina Mina (Napangardi 10).¹⁰ Napangardi's bodily and material connection to the land through ceremony and painting enacted her ancestral stories and contributed to the continual becoming of her Country.

These insights prompted me to think about how the Traditional Owners of Golden Gully would understand this place and how my actions could potentially affect Wiradyuri Country through touch and sounding. I contacted Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises for cultural guidance and permission to use ochre from the land.¹¹ In providing me with permission to use cultural resources from their Country, the Elders requested that I present their letter of support alongside public displays of my work as a practice of 'cultural manners' (Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises).¹² I regard acting upon this significant request as a step towards developing an embodied listening practice that is critically aware and culturally responsible.

One scholarly approach that can be taken as a respectful and collaborative model, is a geographical study undertaken with and within Bawaka Country in North East Arnhem Land. In this study, Bawaka Country is attributed as the lead author alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous human co-authors, for whom Indigenous Yolŋu perspectives lead their embodied scholarly practices of place and space (Bawaka Country including Wright et al. 456). The authors aim to "shift relationships of power away from an (Anglo) human-centered dominance towards a reconceptualisation of a co-emergent world based on intimate human-more-than-human relationships of responsibility and care" (Bawaka Country including Wright et al. 470). In the context of my dialogue with the Traditional Owners of Golden Gully and in regards to the ochre currently in my care, I find this approach to be generative for developing a responsible relationship with Golden Gully as a living place that is unfolding within the vitality of Wiradyuri Country. In learning to consider the deep connection that Wiradyuri people continue to practice with the living materiality of their Country and engaging in a dialogue with the community, I have come to understand that listening, drawing and sounding within places necessitates developing a respectful dialogue with existing cultural and social practices.

In doing so, it is important for me to recognise the stories and experiences that continue to be repressed and elided by dominant historical narratives. In Hill End, I observed minimal representation of Wiradyuri people's experiences, voices and practices in the brochures and signage of historical sites during my artist residencies.¹³ Historian Bronwyn Hanna urges for "greater due [to] be given to Aboriginal culture in the various historical representations in and about Hill End (....) and that the specificities of Aboriginal women's culture be acknowledged" (Hanna 38-9). It is known that "Wiradjuri women harvested a wide range of plant foods" (Ibid., 43) in the area around Hill End and many Wiradyuri people were killed and dispossessed during the pastoral settlement period in the 1820s.¹⁴ In researching these histories, I came to realise that Wiradyuri people's experiences and relationships with this place are likely to be shaped by their cultural knowledge and practices, and possibly by ancestral memories of trauma embedded within the land. The elision of these stories continues to affect how Golden Gully and Hill End are understood within the broader Australian national imaginary and by visitors such as myself.

My own, initial impressions of Hill End and Golden Gully were strongly shaped by the twentieth century landscape paintings of Anglo-Australian male artists such as Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, Brett Whitely and Jeffrey Smart.¹⁵ The predominance of masculine, Anglo-Australian experiences in the national imaginary of Hill End not only represses the experiences of the Wiradyuri people, but also those of women who contributed to the culture and industry of this place. Hanna argues that the history of Hill End "has long been understood and presented in an obviously masculine register" (Hanna 10) since the emergence of the gold mining industry in the 1850s. Female artists Margaret Olley and Jean Bellette were known to have worked in Hill End during the 1940s and 50s; Olley is recorded in Friend's diaries as having "painted until the light failed" and carried "huge canvases for miles through the bush" (Friend 593). However, Olley and Bellette's paintings and engagement with the Hill End landscape are noticeably overlooked in the art historical literature.¹⁶ It is important to address these elisions in order to develop a deeper and more multifaceted understanding of this place that is representative of the actual diversity underpinning the nation that is both historic and contemporary, but which has largely been repressed in the cultural imaginary.

Researching these stories, asking Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises for cultural guidance, and reflecting upon how my hands and body were part of a manifold continuum that would touch or encounter Golden Gully in different ways was extremely valuable for understanding my ongoing relationship with this place. Critically reflecting upon my role in making Sounding through Touch in Golden Gully has opened new, ongoing enquiries for me about what it means to be emplaced and to listen with my body in ways that are accountable and culturally responsible. I developed an awareness of the social and cultural specificities of the ways I listened with my body, and a deeper understanding of how I was positioned as a visitor and creative practitioner within this place that is alive and unfolding with each moment.

Works Cited

Bawaka Country, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru and Jill Sweeney. 'Co-becoming Bawaka; Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space.' Progress in Human Geography, vol.40, no.4, 2016, pp. 455-475.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies. 1st ed., Routledge, 1995, p.31-2.

Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang Enterprises. Letter of Support. 2019 (PDF).

Hanna, Bronwyn. Re-gendering the Landscape in New South Wales - Report for the Department of Environment and Conservation. New South Wales Government Office of Environment and Heritage, 2011. Last modified Feb. 26, 2011, pp.10-44.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 'Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.' Space, Gender, Knowledge - Feminist Readings, edited by Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp, 1st ed., Arnold, 1997, pp. 53-72.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. 1st ed., Fordham University Press, 2007, pp.8-71.

Napangardi, Dorothy. 'Statement by Dorothy Napangardi.' Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi. 1st ed., Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002, p. 10. New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage. 'Hill End Historic Site.' Accessed Jan. 5, 2019.

Noë, Alva, and Evan Thompson. Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Ist ed., The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 2-3.

Rawson, Philip. Drawing. 1st ed., Oxford U.P, 1969, p. 15.

Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life - Biology, Phenomenology and The Sciences of Mind. 1st ed., Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 13.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. 1st ed., MIT Press, 1993.

Voegelin, Salomé. Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. 1st ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, p.106.

Wilson, Gavin. The Artists of Hill End. 1st ed., The Beagle Press and The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1995.

Wilson, Gavin. The Artists of Hill End: Art, Life and Landscape - Hill End Visitor Information Centre Brochure. Bathurst: NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Collected December 2016.