To understand how the inanimate relates to the animate, Mel O’Callaghan traces cultural practices centred around sites on earth that are said to remain similar to when life first emerged. Looking at the significance of these sites through time, as places to gather and enact ritual, the artist contemplates the generative experience of these practices.
Exploring the relationship between life and nonlife – the animate and the inanimate, Mel O’Callaghan exhibits: an ambitious installation activated by performers, who by striking a three-metre-high tuning fork, send vibrations from object to performer to audience; a sound work humming the “pulse of the earth,” and a two-channel film documenting the ritual practices of Velip women of Ambaulim in Goa during the festival Dhalo, which is accompanied by a series of recorded interviews collated during the artist’s trip to India. Split across two spaces at Carriageworks, All is Life presents a meditation on modes of experience.
Mel O’Callaghan, First sound, last sound (performance), 2022. Installation view, All is Life, 2022, Carriageworks, Sydney. © the artist. Photograph: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist, Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney and Galerie Allen, Paris
Carriageworks
23 June to 21 August 2022
Sydney
