Frances Barrett: Meatus Exhibition Kit

Frances Barrett: Meatus is an exhibition project led by artist Frances Barrett in collaboration with artists Nina Buchanan, Debris Facility Pty Ltd., Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga. In developing the exhibition Barrett drew on her background in performance, curation and collaborative models of art making.  

The exhibition presents four new sonic compositions and a series of interventions and live performances by multiple artists and features a major new sound installation in ACCA’s largest gallery space. The exhibition title Meatus refers to an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body; ear canals, oral cavities and nostrils are all examples of meatus that passage through the body and into each other. For this project the artist has conceived ACCA’s galleries as an enormous form of meatus for the audience to enter; a passage through which to experience an immersive and sensory exhibition of sound, light and colour. 

Frances Barrett: Meatus was supported by Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a unique suite of three fellowships awarded to female-identifying Australian artists working at the nexus of performance and installation to present ambitious new commissions. Named in memory of the Italian-born Australian artist Katthy Cavaliere (1972-2012), the fellowship was made possible with funds from the Estate of Katthy Cavaliere in partnership with Carriageworks, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona).

Commissioning Curator: Annika Kristensen

How to use this kit:

This exhibition kit has been written by ACCA Education to support learning alongside ACCA Open.  Three artworks from the exhibition have been highlighted, with discussion questions to prompt thinking with students. Primary and Secondary activities are mapped to the Victorian and Australian Curriculum, and can be found in the For Teachers section. VCE students and teachers can view the Support Material section for further reading, video and audio interviews.

About the Artists

Frances Barrett 

Frances Barrett (She/Her) is an artist who lives and works on Kaurna land, Adelaide. Her recent projects explore listening and touch, taking the form of immersive sound installations, live performances and interventions into Museum collections. Barrett is currently a Lecturer at the University of South Australia. In 2019 she was one of three recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a solo commission for female-identifying artists working across performance and installation. Her fellowship project is also the focus of her PhD, titled Meatus: A Curatorial Passage, which she undertook at Monash University. Since 2007 Barrett has been one member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland with artists Diana Baker Smith, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley. 

Debris Facility Pty Ltd.

Debris Facility Pty Ltd (Them/All) is a Naarm-based, queer body corporate and cross media artist. As an artistic/corporate entity whose activities often parody and parasite processes of neoliberal identity construction and industrial commodification, they produce wearable works, installations, interventions, design and performances which respond to specific contexts and coworkers. They extend their pedagogical work through contracts with Liquid Architecture and Victorian College of the Arts. Since graduating from Australian National University,  School of Art and Design, Canberra in 2007, they have exhibited and produced works in local, national and international contexts, including galleries, performance spaces, publications and others. 

Nina Buchanan

Nina Buchanan (She/Her) is a Melbourne-based electronic musician and composer, working at the intersection of club music, analogue synth experimentation and classical composition. Renowned for her immersive live performances, Buchanan’s elemental, intuitive approach to electronic music incorporates lush melodic synth lines, thumping techno rhythms and atmospheric soundscapes. In recent years Buchanan’s practice has explored spatial experimentation, her debut LP Restless Abandon was released in late 2021. 

 

 

 

Key Artworks

Frances Barrett, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, worm divination (segmented realities) 2020, immersive sound environment, 32:30 mins, installation view, Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2022. Commissioned by ACCA with the support of The Katthy Cavaliere Foundation. Courtesy the artists. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Frances Barrett, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, worm divination (segmented realities) 2020

immersive sound environment 32:30 mins
Audio Engineer: Felix Abrahams
Speaker System: Yamaha DZR10 and DZR12 speakers, with
DXS18 subs
Programming: Barco’s IOSONO 3D Spatial Audio Rendering
System
Commissioned by ACCA with the support of The Katthy
Cavaliere Foundation. ACCA also acknowledges the support
of Yamaha; aFX-Global; Monash University Art Design
and Architecture, Melbourne; Chunky Move, Melbourne;
Vitalstatistix, Adelaide; and Artspace, Sydney
Courtesy the artists

worm divinations (segmented realities) 2020 is a sonic composition created by artist Frances Barrett in collaboration with Brian Fuata and Hayley Forward. The artwork was developed as an immersive sound experience, designed to envelop the audience and respond directly to the unique dimensions of ACCA’s largest gallery space. The artwork is mixed on the IOSONO 3D spatial audio rendering system and presented through a series of 37 Yamaha loudspeakers and subwoofers.  

The composition is based on a series of modulated vocal performances sequenced into segments. The structure of the work replicates the segmented body of a worm, beginning in the mouth and moving through the body. At different points throughout the art making process, each of the artists’ took turns to inhabit the role of the worm. As such, the worm can be seen to represent the artists’ conceptual approaches to their mode of collaboration. In a process not unlike composting, the artist-worm’s role was to ingest the raw material of text, sound, movement and score, and process it through performance, improvisation and listening. The worm-artist then transformed this raw material into ‘compost’ through a process of transformation, effectively consuming the raw material and spitting or expelling it from their bodies to create a work that is non-linear. The raw material digested by the artists included a range of external literary and artistic sources–including twentieth-century authors such as William Burroughs, and Kathy Acker, queer theory, avant-garde French theatre director and dramaturge Antonin Artaud and experimental bands such as Throbbing Gristle. 

Discussion questions

  • What is sound; how is it made; Can we feel the touch of sound? 
  • Sound is an essential component of this artwork. Why would an artist be interested in exploring sound? List some reasons you can think of. 
  • How does sound get inside your body? What role does listening play in relation to sound and in understanding this artwork?
  • Create/Evaluate/Analyse If you had to create a non-visual artwork, what sense/s would you choose to work with (touch, smell, hearing, taste and proprioception {spatial awareness}), and what form would it take?
Debris Facility Pty Ltd, EarWorm 2020-22, installation view, Frances Barrettt: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2022. Commissioned by ACCA with the support of The Katthy Cavaliere Foundation. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Debris Facility Pty Ltd, EarWorm 2020-22

earring, tattoo, photographic wall vinyl, random sound loop,
catalogue contributions, various interventions
Photograph: Charles Dennington
Tattoo: Adam Traves/Disinhibiton
Courtesy the artist

Debris Facility Pty Ltd., is a corporate entity/artist whose artistic contribution to Meatus takes multiple forms. Titled EarWorm 2020, their work includes the earring worn by Brian Fuata in the ‘hero image’ used to promote the exhibition; physical tattoos on the ear of the artist; documentation of these tattoos which appear as vinyl decals in the ACCA bathrooms; small metal sculptures magnetised to the entryways to the gallery spaces; a feature in the exhibition catalogue; and a sound installation in the ACCA foyer. EarWorm 2020 functions as a ‘parasitic’ intervention into Meatus, occupying the gaps and hidden spaces within the exhibition and ACCA’s internal architecture. Debris Facility Pty Ltd is interested in ideas related to traces, mark making and vermiculation. Vermiculation is the mark-making of a worm’s movement, as well as an architectural term used to describe wavy mark-making on the surface of brickwork. The artist/entity’s work for Meatus creates both sonic and visual vermiculation throughout ACCA, puncturing the exhibition’s framework, causing holes and openings where both the sonic and material might pop up or leak out unexpectedly. 

The idea of the earworm is also a central component of Debris Facility’s sonic composition in the foyer.  An earworm is a fragment of music or sound that gets stuck in the listener’s brain and loops around over and over. It can be an addictive, annoying or pleasurable sound that remains hooked within the mind of the listener long after it has sounded, like a catchy song that you can’t get out of your head. Taking inspiration from this phenomenon, the artist’s alarm-like sounds in the ACCA foyer seek to burrow into a listeners’ ears disrupting the other artists’ sound compositions.

Discussion questions

  • Have you experienced an earworm before? Describe it? What was the sensation? 
  • Why do you think an artist would  be interested in disrupting a gallery/institutional space
  • What is a parasite? What do you think the artist means when they describe their installation for Meatus as a ‘parasitic intervention’?

 

Nina Buchanan, Body Scanner 2021, multi-channel sound installation 15:00–20:00 mins, installation view, Frances Barrett: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2022. Commissioned by ACCA with the support of The Katthy Cavaliere Foundation. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Nina Buchanan, Body Scanner 2021

multi-channel sound installation
15:00 - 20:00 mins
Courtesy the artist

Commissioned for this exhibition, Body Scanner 2021 is a continuation of composer Nina Buchanan’s ongoing investigation into the relationships between humans and technology. Buchanan is an artist, electronic musician and composer who creates emotionally-charged sonic environments for listeners to engage in deep listening that incorporates both personal and collective experiences. The artwork explores the potential for music and sound to allow for the ‘metabolising’ of subconscious emotional experiences –sound as a way to process feelings. The flexible concept of body scanning may refer to several embodied experiences including a meditation and mindfulness practice; health, fitness and/or medical screening; and a security screening process in which the body’s internal structure becomes visible. Through the form of a multi-channel sound installation, the artwork Body Scanner sonically explores the multiplicity of what a ‘body scan’ can be and the emotional affects sound may invoke within the body. Buchanan draws from many references such as science fiction writers Octavia Butler, and Ursula Le Guin; electronic music subgenres such as IDM (intelligent dance music) and glitch; and the instinctual, playful compositional approach of synthesiser pioneer Suzanne Cianni. 

The composition is designed to move through lush soothing ambient sounds before building towards purposefully anxiety-inducing tones and rhythms. Body Scanner uses the three-dimensional aural field (sound which envelops the audience), complex polyrhythms (simultaneous combinations of contrasting rhythms in a musical composition), and shifting tempos and phasing. Buchanan’s work seeks to disorient the audience; she is interested in disrupting the audience’s sense of autonomy and agency over their own body as the sound pans up and down the gallery space. 

Discussion questions

  • What feelings and thoughts does the artwork title Body Scanner evoke in you? 
  •  Describe an embodied experience you have had–a time you have been attuned to your body and its sensations as well as changes and subtleties. 
  •  The artwork explores music and sounds ability to support the ‘metabolising’ of subconscious emotional experiences. Do you think the ‘metabolising’ of subconscious emotional experiences through engagement with sound and music’ is possible, why/why not? 
  • Why would an artist/ musician be interested in disorientating the audience? What elements combine in this work to create this effect? 

Support Material

Read:  An in conversation with artist Frances Barrett and curator Annika Kristensen https://acca.melbourne/in-conversation-frances-barrett-and-annika-kristensen/

Read: A Roundtable Conversation with artists Frances Barrett, Felix Abrahams, Nina Buchanan, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta, Claudia Nicholson and Sione Teumohenga

https://acca.melbourne/roundtable-conversation/ 

Video: An ABC kids video describing an earworm.

 https://fb.watch/bB5gYcuRPy/

Video: Studio by Un projects is an artist interview series. In this episode Debris Facility Pty Ltd is interviewed in their studio.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUuSgBrjoc

Website: An online virtual oscilloscope which allows you to visualise live sound input

https://academo.org/demos/virtual-oscilloscope/

Education Resource: A teaching resource for supporting experiential engagement with sound  https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/may/11/how-to-teach-sound

For Teachers

Primary activities

Drawing soundscapes

As a class, gather a collection of different materials and objects with varying textures. Let the class inspect the materials asking them to focus on how they feel, and how the materials sound when touched. As a class, students write down as many types of textures they can think of – soft, silky, rough, prickly, furry, etc.  Ask students to think of a place that’s important to them, then they must write a list of 5 materials, objects or actions that make sounds in that place. Ask students: what combination of texture/action/movement makes this sound? Invite students to make a picture of the place that is important to them by drawing the textures and the sounds that the class discussed.

Performing Onomatopoeia

Learn onomatopoeia words and practice saying them out loud to best emphasise the sound they describe. For example, you could whisper the word ‘whisper’. In small groups, pick three onomatopoeia words and take turns, practice saying them in different orders, at different volumes, and with different emphasis on the syllables. As a group, choose one arrangement to perform to your class. Teachers may record the performances. 

Australian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Years F-6

Explore ideas and artworks from different cultures and times, including artwork by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, to use as inspiration for their own representations (ACAVAM106) (ACAVAM110) (ACAVAM114)

Use materials, techniques and processes to explore visual conventions when making artworks (ACAVAM107) (ACAVAM111) (ACAVAM115)

Create and display artworks to communicate ideas to an audience (ACAVAM108) (ACAVAM112) (ACAVAM116)

Victorian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Levels F-6

Explore and Express Ideas (VCAVAE013)(VCAVAE017) (VCAVAE021) (VCAVAE025) (VCAVAE029) 

Visual Arts Practices (VCAVAV018) (VCAVAV022) (VCAVAV026) (VCAVAV030) 

Present and Perform  (VCAVAP019) (VCAVAP023)(VCAVAP027)

Respond and Interpret (VCAVAR020) (VCAVAR024) (VCAVAR028) (VCAVAR032)

 

Curriculum Interpretation

This activity is devised in response to the exhibition Frances Barrett: Meatus, an exhibition of sound and light that explores the visceral and embodied. Students explore the relationships between their environment, and sound and listening, and its impacts on the body and create a series of drawings and performances making visible a unique sonic experience. The activities are intended to build students’ capacity to consider and utilise experimental methods for creating performance and drawings.

By undertaking these activities, students:

  • Explore the relationship between art and their environment.  
  • Explore ideas and concepts related to sound, embodied experience and critical listening in relation to contemporary art.
  • Experiment with a range of reflective and experiential  performance and drawing techniques. 
  • Select and experiment with a range of art forms, styles, materials, and technologies.
  • Consider the exhibition Frances Barrett: Meatus as inspiration for their own art making.
  • Consider how STEM ideas and principles are embedded in art making processes.

 

Secondary activities

Mapping sound 

Gather students together and play a series of sonic compositions of differing tempo and rhythm. Ask students to think about the sound entering their bodies. How does it feel and does it affect their emotions and/or physicality? Can we metabolise sound? Give students a set of drawing materials and ask them to track the trajectory of sound through the space around them. Where and how do they think the sound is travelling? Will their drawings look similar or different to their classmates? Why or why not?

Drawing Soundscapes 

As a class, listen to artist Archie Barry’s Multiply 2020, an online sound artwork commissioned by ACCA for the ACCA Open which is intended to be experienced online. Connected by their shared interests in sonic compositions, artist Frances Barrett invited Archie Barry to contribute to Meatus through a performance at ACCA. While the students listen to Multiply, ask them to draw collaboratively on butcher’s paper to create a series of soundscapes. They will create a visual expression of how they experience the artwork. Ask students to think about how the sound enters their body and then how it might manifest outwards through their creative and collaborative drawing. How can they capture and express sound and energy in a drawing? For example, they may want to draw repetitive shapes, squiggles, scratching, and pulsating lines that move up and down the paper. As an extension, use Ipads, computers, or smartphones, to access an online oscilloscope during the activity to see sound: specifically, the ‘traces’ of the artwork’s ‘wave forms’  in real time. Ask your students to experiment with the online oscilloscope and incorporate the wave forms they witnessed into their drawing. 

 

Australian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Years 7-10

 

Plan and design artworks that represent artistic intention (ACAVAM120, ACAVAM128)

Present ideas for displaying artworks (ACAVAM122, ACAVAM129)

Experiment with visual arts conventions and techniques (ACAVAM118) (ACAVAM125) 

Practise techniques and processes to enhance representation of ideas in their art-making (ACAVAM121) ​​ (ACAVAM128)

Victorian Curriculum / Visual Arts / Levels 7-10

Explore and Express Ideas

(VCAVAE033)(VCAVAE034)(VCAVAE040)(VCAVAE041)

Visual Arts Practices

(VCAVAV035) (VCAVAV036) (VCAVAV042)(VCAVAV043)

Respond and Interpret

(VCAVAR038)(VCAVAR045)

 

Curriculum Interpretation

This activity is devised in response to the exhibition Frances Barrett: Meatus, an exhibition of sound and light that explores the visceral and embodied. Students explore the relationship between sound and listening and its impacts on the body and create a series of drawings making visible a unique sonic experience. Teachers are presented with the opportunity to embed STEM ideas and principles into their lesson plan to develop students’ understanding about their artworks. 

By undertaking these activities, students:

  • Explore ideas and concepts related to sound, embodied experience and critical listening in relation to contemporary art.
  • Experiment with a range of reflective and experiential  drawing techniques. 
  • Select and experiment with a range of art forms, styles, materials, and technologies.
  • Consider the exhibition Frances Barrett: Meatus as inspiration for their own art making.
  • Consider how STEM ideas and principles are embedded in art making processes.

Terms of Use

This education resource has been produced by ACCA Education to provide information and classroom support material for education visits to the exhibition Frances Barrett: Meatus. The reproduction and communication of this resource is permitted for educational purposes only.

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