Warm / Loose
Warm / Loose is the fifth chapter of a project titled ‘Home’ that is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities that arise from its architecture and location in Far North Queensland Australia.
The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugar cane farm. The windows are open all of the time mostly to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior).
It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. [I]t is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008).
In Warm / Loose; We are safe inside. There is a noisy sleeper. The rain gives us a break from the constant heat. There is the heavy scent of petrichor from the bitchumen, petrichor from the garden. Soak it up.
Melissa Ryke is based in Lille, France.
Melissa Ryke is a contemporary artist based in Australia and France where she is currently undertaking a state supported studio residency at the Carré des Artistes in Lille. In what is largely an experimental and hybrid practice, she works across the mediums of video, sound, text, drawing and installation. Her practice-led research is driven by how our experiences are remade through the moving-image and sound.
Ryke’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at Kepler’s Gardens for Ars Electronica, Screen Space and Seventh Gallery Melbourne, Palais des Beaux Arts Lille, !MetroArts and Boxcopy Brisbane and published in Runway Australian Experimental Art.