Sunday Arts Magazine

4 Jan 2021

Madelynne Cornish talks to David about Site and Sound.

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Madelynne Cornish talks to David about Site and Sound.

Madelynne Cornish is an Australian audio-visual artist and curator based in Victoria. She is co-
founder and director of operations for the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, an independent arts

initiative that facilitates cultural projects investigating the history and ecology of the Australian Alps.
For ten years Cornish has used sound, video and installation to make works that question our
perceptions of the natural environment. Her practice has focused on the effects of climate on
natural and constructed environments, the dynamics informing remote communities, and the
relationships between environment, human actions and land use.
Radial Fields (2020) is an audio-visual installation investigating the relationships between urban
ecology, human engagement and land use. Created during a month-long residency, it draws on the
rich landscape of McClelland’s sculpture park and surrounding environment, including a wetland
conservation area, council nature reserve, concrete works, sand quarry, and residential estates. The
project’s foci are the temporal and spatial qualities of the geography and the fauna and flora of
these sites—microphones were placed in and around the sculpture park and its borderlands to
register natural and anthropogenic sound including industry, wildlife and weather. These sounds are
juxtaposed with the visual framing of the urban ecology to create an immersive audio-visual
installation in the gallery, which details the complexity of the ecological interactions occurring within
the sculpture park and its environs.