Justine Walsh
With materials including stone, eggshells, plants, voice and sound, I create gestures of intimacy, subtly posing questions of being and emptiness through iterative & process-based making. I carve, collect, listen and produce soundworks, arranging these elements together as remnants and offerings.
…a reverberation of light and sound, softly humming, drifting in and out of awareness -- the sky expands and condenses, the leaves rustle with conversation; someone is speaking, singing, sighing, lamenting, praying…
Grounded in a deep-rooted vocal and sound practice, inspired by experimental archaeology and folk healing, I excavate & research, sensing affinities in my own experiences and customs of ritual, grieving, transformation and renewal.
The sculpture becomes a listening well from deep inside the earth: stones, bones, shells, grit; ear canal, holy well; portals, rifts, silences between breath - the resonance in the remnants.
Justine Walsh, And we will feel the weight fall away from us in time. Image Courtesy the University of Melbourne.
Justine Walsh, And we will feel the weight fall away from us in time. Image Courtesy the University of Melbourne.
Justine Walsh, and we will feel the weight fall away from us in time (installation view), Limestone, multichannel sound (4:27, 9:07), dimensions variable, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist. Acknowledgements: Title from ‘You and I’ by Jeff Buckley; Traditional Irish lullaby, ‘Bog Braon don tSeanduine’ as taught by Nell Ní Chróinín; Thanks to Geoff Robinson for the limestone, and to Rod Price for the sub woofer.
Justine Walsh, and we will feel the weight fall away from us in time (installation view), Limestone, multichannel sound (4:27, 9:07), dimensions variable, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
Justine Walsh, carving in the workshop with sunlight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist
Justine Walsh, pillar with flint inclusions in Kraków, Poland, June 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
Faculty of Fine Arts and Music
University of Melbourne