Sound Grid 

For interiors, 2016

Materials: Silk organza, polyester organza, polypropylene, cardboard, pink procion dye, synthetic thread.

The Princess Theatre is situated in inner-city Melbourne, and is the oldest theatre in Australia which is still in use today. Though the foyer is a well-trodden place of entertainment, social gathering, and culture, during the day, its foyer is empty and exposed to the footpath of Spring Street. On a whim one day whilst walking past, I stepped inside. 

The series Sound Grid came into life as part of the project Something for the City, a major first year assignment in the RMIT Bachelor of Textiles course. Images of the Princess Theatre’s foyer were overlain with a grid, details shaded in a pattern, and this grid-structure was then transformed into a textile form. The construction of Sound Grid was inspired by traditional western patchworking and Korean pojagi seaming techniques, comprising of geometric pieces of sheer organzas with musical notation expressed through the adjustment of colour (dye and fibre choice), opacity (paper), and reflection (plastic and chemically-altered silk).

The interpretation of musical notation was rather loose here, there was no given key or clef, and the works have no beginning or ending. The textiles can be rotated, flipped, and combined, creating multitudes of options for the interpreter. These works were intended for hanging display in the Princess Theatre’s foyer, with interpretations of their sound to echo around the marble interior.