Reading:
François Jullien – In Praise of Blandness
Sara Ahmed – Living a Feminist Life
Listening to:
Watching:
id m theft able – A tuba by… series
What I’ve been doing:
I am lucky enough to have arrived just in time to begin an artist residency on the island Suomenlinna in Finland, a few days before the world really began to lock down. The island is wonderful, and I have the freedom here to go walking each day, I am so grateful, as normally I don’t have stable housing at all. Becoming familiar with the island, its non-human inhabitants and how it changes day to day has been something of a mental and emotional health saver really. I’ve been making audio recordings, of the weather (it’s very windy and also very changeable here from sun to snow), my studio, the large numbers of barnacle geese which descended on the island about half way through, feedback, and a little cello.
I’ve also been making these large frottage drawings, which I think are something akin to an act of recording. These pieces, like some of field recording/feedback work I’ve been working on here, create imaginary ‘recordings’ of physical space, objects, and textures, fictional landscapes. I’ve been taking rubbings of my interior walls, outdoor stone walls, trees, and rocks, making them part of the one tracing, a recording of an impossible surface. I feel like this is a good thing to do when spending so much time within interiors, maybe everyone should be making frottages of their walls?
Judith Hamann is a performer/artist from Narrm/Birraranga (Melbourne). Her current work includes an examination of ‘shaking’ in her solo cello performance practice, the creation of new works for cello and humming, and a discourse based research project ‘Materialities of Realisation’ with Charles Curtis. Judith has worked with many lovely people, for example Dennis Cooper, Áine O’Dwyer, Alvin Lucier, and Eliane Radigue. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from University of California, San Diego, where she majored in contemporary cello performance and is currently without a fixed address. Amateur stick and poker, travel spice pro.