Performance:

To coincide with the opening of How to Weather Together, exhibiting artist Henri van Noordenburg and composure Paul Smith will present a live performance in the gallery.

The Still Water project takes outcomes and processes from Henri’s visual art practice and Smith’s composition and practice, and presents them in a performance. Integral to the structure of the work is collaborative improvisation. Each artist responds to the other’s input, and this in turn affects the performance and finished work. The finished products of the work are (a) a performance for an audience, (b) a new work-on-paper, and (c) a sound recording.

Born in The Netherlands and based in Brisbane, Henri van Noordenburg is a visual artist whose practice merges photography, drawing and performance to explore memory, landscape and belonging. Using a distinctive hand-carved technique inspired by sgraffito, his works have been exhibited internationally, including the Manila Biennale and Scope Basel. He has received multiple awards, and his work is held in major public and private collections including LACMA and NERAM.

Paul Smith (he/they) is a composer and researcher based in Sydney who specialises in writing opera and music for the toy piano. He is Associate Professor of Music at the University of New England. Paul has held composer/performer residencies in Armenia (2018), Italy (2019) and Japan (2024), and he was a featured composer of the inaugural Korean toy piano festival in Seoul. In 2022 he received the ABC Composer Commission Fund to compose three new works for toy piano and recorder which were released by ABC Classics. Paul’s traditional research focuses on the politics of singing and the voice and recent publications explore multilingualism in opera.

Image: Henri van Noordenburg, Composition XCI Arvo Pärt deck, 2024. Hand carved ink on Hahnemühle