Player Piano, 64 Pianola rolls, boxes, labels, shelf

Exhibitions: MONA Scholarship exhibition, 2011, MONA; Come to Life, 2012, Queen Victoria and Albert Museum, Launceston

I once made a necklace by cutting the punctuation (in order) out of a photocopy of a local Hobart artist’s Masters exegesis. I was left with a thick stack of A4 pages full of square holes, and I thought, what if you could play the gaps?

With this in mind, I contacted artists whose work I admire and asked them to send me a text on their practice, ideas and inspiration, and the names of other artists who in turn inspire them, and whom I then contacted as well.

I put an ad in the paper for a Pianola (Player Piano), and viewed I think 7 in the end in various stages of disrepair. I settled on Anne’s, a Beale that had been the centre of many a family sing-along but was now kept in the garage of a smaller house. Anne cried when I took it away.

There are 88 holes on a tracker bar for the Player Piano: these relate to the 88 keys on the Player Piano keyboard. Air is what makes it work.

The texts were transferred to player piano rolls as 88 characters and spaces on each line, relating to the 88 holes on the tracker bar. Each line becomes one bar of music.

It’s kind of like writing from the lowest note to the highest up the staves, vertically. Or like writing directly onto the keyboard, including all sharps/flats. Punctuation, line and paragraph breaks have been perforated according to my own rules of time.

What is heard is not what is being said, it is what is not being said. It’s the slippage, the verge, the intuitive, the un-writing, the thinking, the pause: 

“the space in which thought is generated and tuned into coherence." - Sean Kelly, Shotgun catalogue essay, 2010

List of works:

Steve Baker, WHERE THINGS ARE, 28.5 x 707 cm

Jordan Baseman, 28.5 x 550 cm

Mande Bijelic, 28.5 x 321 cm

Cameron Bishop and Simon Reis, The Max Bell Gallery (Gallery x Series), 28.5 x 496 cm

Lucy Bleach, 28.5 x 473 cm

Ben Booth, 28.5 x 550 cm!

Pat Brassington, 28.5 x 288 cm

Trudi Brinkman, 28.5 x 469 cm

Matt Calvert, 28.5 x 400 cm !

Rebecca Coote, 28.5 x 630 cm

Scot Cotterel, If I die in an m.r.i, 28.5 x 573 cm

Simon Cuthbert, Better Days, 28.5 x 504 cm

Amanda Davies, Surface Agitation, 28.5 x 700 cm!

Jeremy Deller, 28.5 x 179 cm

Mikala Dwyer, Flowers, Flies and Someone Else, 28.5 x 287 cm

Shaun Gladwell, Anonymous Figures, 28.5 x 880 cm

Neil Haddon, 28.5 x 887 cm

Andrew Harper, 28.5 x 656 cm

Bill Hart, 28.5 x 467 cm

Sonia Heap, 28.5 x 400 cm

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, 28.5 x 300 cm

Sean Hibberd, 28.5 x 771 cm

Leigh Hobba, Self Storage, 28.5 x 412 cm

Louise Hubbard, Praxis Maximus – parking the car in Sudoku, 28.5 x 662 cm

Stephen Hurrel, 28.5 x 647 cm

Jamin, Shields against the enemy, 28.5 x 600 cm

Ant Johnson, Celestial Table (16h29m24.40s, -26°25’55.0”), 28.5 x 600 cm

Megan Keating, Myth-understanding; text and screen, 28.5 x 671 cm

Alicia King, The Vision Splendid, 28.5 x 621 cm

Annika Koops, 28.5 x 630 cm

Svenja Kratz, The Absence of Alice, 28.5 x 565 cm

Colin Langridge, 28.5 x 550 cm

Fiona Lee, 12 Criterion St, 28.5 x 600 cm

Kevin Leong, 28.5 x 395 cm

Marise Maas, 28.5 x 580 cm

Sara Maher, 28.5 x 340 cm

Noel McKenna, 28.5 x 251 cm

Gary Fabian Miller, 28.5 x 512 cm

James Newitt, 28.5 x 400 cm

Rob O’Connor, -Core, 28.5 x 550 cm

Tom O’Hern, Dog Boy, 28.5 x 287 cm

Justy Phillips, 28.5 x 404 cm

Deborah Pollard, Blue Print, 28.5 x 790 cm

Ellie Ray, Nothing is still, 28.5 x 494 cm

Sally Rees, 28.5 x 800 cm

Elvis Richardson, HAVE YOU EVER?, 28.5 x 650 cm!

Cameron Robbins, Wind Drawings and working with natural forces, 28.5 x 600cm

Jack Robins, 28.5 x 400 cm

Peter Angus Robinson, The irrelevance of chips, 28.5 x 530 cm

Raef Sawford, 28.5 x 323 cm

Amanda Shone, Week Magique, 28.5 x 320 cm

Paula Silva, 28.5 x 287 cm

Nicola Smith, 28.5 x 375 cm

Bec Stevens, 28.5 x 610 cm

Calum Stirling, 28.5 x 690 cm

Tristan Stowards, 28.5 x 600 cm

Lucia Usmiani, 28.5 x 572 cm

John Vella, Blowing my own nose, 28.5 x 573 cm

Martin Walch, 28.5 x 494 cm

Megan Walch, The Lineage of Eccentricity, 28.5 x 680 cm

Yvette Watt, 28.5 x 580 cm

Matt Warren, 28.5 x 431 cm

Elizabeth Woods, 28.5 x 345 cm

Jim Woodring, 28.5 x 404 cm