glass house mountains: judy watson and liza lim
It was the soundscape that immediately propelled you forward past the bookstall and entry desk at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), so at odds was it with Fortitude Valley’s traffic and street noise. Composer Liza Lim and visual artist Judy Watson joined forces to address the unique geological formations to the city’s north, known as the Glass House Mountains. These are a series of ancient eroded volcanoes which are familiar signposts of the hinterland to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The multi-part installation by Lim and Watson was accompanied in the back space of the IMA by a simpler (yet no less successful) collaborative work by Lilla Watson and Timothy O’Dwyer, with the evocative title Soft Night Falling.
Glass house mountains was presented by the Queensland Music Festival in association with the IMA and the music ensemble ELISION (of which Lim is part) and it draws attention to collaborative works where sound is not incidental to visual imagery or the reverse. While Glass house mountains inspired Lim to compose pieces such as Beerwah (for cello and electronics), a superbly realised musical transcription of a surveyor’s contour map of the largest mountain in the group, O’Dwyer sourced his soundscape for Soft Night Falling more directly from the natural environment around Dawson River in Central Queensland. Both aural components of these IMA projects bled into and enhanced one another.
An obvious feature of these meditative and sensory mappings of Queensland experience is the intent to prolong and slow the pace of a viewer’s attention. It is as though they are a reproof to Paul Virilio’s rhetoric of ‘speed’ and rapid change as a leit motif of late 20th century life