Sound Studies and Aural Cultures
Vicky Browne is an installation artist who utilises everyday objects such as walkmans, iPods, clothing and furniture to comment on Western systems of consumption and networked relationships to ecologies. Browne often manipulates the familiar using traditional craft techniques (such as led light glasswork or weaving), also employing found or produced sound. Browne completed a Master of Visual Art at Sydney College of the Arts in 2010 and her work has been exhibited widely throughout Australia and New Zealand. Exhibitions include works in both Artspace, Sydney; Artspace, Auckland, Living in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, Material Sound at the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Centre Asheville NC (2018) and Promise the Earth at The Lockup Newcastle (2022). Vicky Browne also maintains a collaborative practice with musician Darren Seltmann. Together they have exhibited at MONA FOMA, Hobart, and completed a residency at Artspace Sydney 2014. Vicky Browne was announced the winner of the 2013 Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists’ Travel Scholarship Prize and completed a residency at the 18th street Art centre in Santa Monica in 2015. Browne is currently coordinating the First Year Foundation program at Sydney College of the Arts (The University of Sydney). A major survey exhibition of her work will open at the Blue Mountains Cultural Center (NSW) on September the 9th 2022.
The first, all things are water (2019-20), rethought water in its many forms across diverse disciplines. Backgrounded by a brutal drought and bushfire season, it also became an elegy for our times.
Fixed now on terra firma, PROMISE THE EARTH will naturally continue that conversation with urgent ecological imperatives and the environment. Equally it will speak to cultural perspectives, ritual and connection. Moving between installation, photomedia, painting and interactive experiences, this exhibition presents earth as a material for making, as a site of sustenance and survival, and as a metaphor for home.
The exhibition features artists Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Evelyn Malgil, Leyla Stevens, Brett McMahon, Ryan Andrew Lee, Sara Morawetz, Vicky Browne and Isha Ram Das.
She is absolutely my style though I don’t have much time to do deep investigations cause the timeline is toward handing. But her ideas on using various materials, ceramics are very inspiring. I am also making some sound installations right now, so I will look at how she triggers the box to sound nice with ceramic in the near future. As I am looking at her interview, I find this is well documented.
“Sound is commonly registered as an everyday phenomenon of ethereal transmission, its intensity a measure of distance and receptivity of the ear. Indeed, it’s only when the material relations change drastically, for example, when going under water, that sound distorts, behaving differently, prompting us to question its qualities as a medium for art. Silence, also, is so often taken for granted. Only rarely do we listen for it to realise that silence is rarely actually silent, but only less noisy.”