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Preston, Julieanna. windwoundweatherwovenwirewoman [performance]. At Performing, Writing: a symposium in four turns (in association with The Performance Arcade), Turn Two: ON Site at Matiu/ Somes Island, Wellington Waterfront, NZ, 13 March 2016.

 

 

At Matiu Island, I became an embodied sounding instrument charged by the wind to read the fence continuously as long as it took to circumnavigate the quarantine facility.

Pitched as an aural weather forecast, the performance’s score was informed by research on the techniques of production and repair of metal fencing as well as climatic data gathered from New Zealand’s Taihoro Nukurangi/ National Institute of Water and Air’s (NIWA) climate archive CliFlo used to measure and describe environmental air movement.

Recalling Ruskin’s Storm-Cloud lectures of 1884, windwoundweatherwovenwirewoman was a vocalisation as foreboding as a storm of environmental or cultural crisis and equally as fertile as a still, warm sticky night. Given the multi-layered and faceted events that structure Matiu Island’s geology, geography, inhabitation, management, protection and development, what is the pitch and tenor of that forecast?

 

In 2017, spatial designer Joshua Lewis and I reconsidered the footage and sound recordings taken at the performance and created a video as a critical reflection and trace of the event. We employed software filters to synch the sound with video footage such that the sound volume regulated the visual imagery and its pace. This video is entitled “wwwwww” and can be found HERE.

The video informed “Four castings”, a collection of artist pages published in Performance Research (On performance & writing, 2018. LINK to PDF