Camilla Hannan, As the Bough Breaks, 2013
Dual Headphone Audio, Duration: 7.01 & 8.45, Photography by Matthew Stanton
As the Bough Breaks is a dual headphone presentation of two audio works.
The first is an edited version of an audio letter I sent to my father in 2006 from Bundaberg, Queensland. It describes my day making field recordings in cane fields. I was using these recordings for an exhibition I was presenting as artist in residence at Bundaberg Regional Arts Gallery at the time. Due to Parkinsons Disease, my father had lost his ability to read so I had taken to recording audio letters to send to him. The letter describes the events of the day and my reflections on the nature of recording in the field.
The second audio work is a soundscape created using those same cane field recordings as a base. However not all of the source material for the composition comes from that session: I have incorporated other field recordings unrelated to that site. This piece is about how an imaginary landscape can be created using ‘real’ sounds. One’s impression of a particular landscape often has little to do with the actual sounds of a place but is more about what’s going on in one’s head at the time.
Camilla Hannan is a sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia who works exclusively with field recordings. She processes these recordings into abstract representations of place and experience. She is interested in ideas of the ‘sonic object’ and sonic abstraction. Camilla has performed in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A. She has performed at festivals including Articulating the Medium (San Francisco), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Brisbane) and Totally Huge Music Festival (Perth). Her sound installation work has been featured at Instants Chavirés Paris, the Sydney Opera House, San Francisco MOMA, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne and the AC Institute, New York.