Palimpsest 3,
2000
MID-WESTERN HIGHWAY HAY PLAINS NEW SOUTH WALES
I'm prompted by the memory of
a vast expanse of land, a space of reverberant sound and
distant particles of moving light. The instinct is to move
inland leaving the crash of waves and west, away from the
grip of traffic to where vehicles are dominated by a flat
species of silence and geographical space under an immense
vault of sky.
I make an effort to suspend judgements and decisions about
the intuitions that have propelled me out onto the roads traversing
the plains, allowing the memory of that first encounter over
a decade ago to become more insistent. I set up directional
microphones to record at dusk the passing of trucks and sounds
of the earth as the heat of day soaks into nightfall. During
the days that follow I listen to the tapes, which somehow becomes
thrilling! And a sense of inhabiting ideas without boundaries
is all pervasive.
Between the mirages of midday and the
sheen of moonlight I think about lines inscribed by station
tracks and ribbons of bitumen onto the surface of the land,
but ruminate more on a spatial universe of sound pushed from
the thorax of countless unseen creatures sundered by the
sonic trajectories of diesel engines. A sense of limitless
expansion in a vast black field of slow-moving headlights,
I feel absolutely grounded but weightless.
Martin Sims February 2000 - June 2001
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