Selected works + performances

This work explores the idea of Westward Cottage and its land as witness to a long and evolving history, as a stoic container for stories of love, and lineage, and loss. It is composed of poetic and prosaic responses to historical research of the area, found sounds recorded at Westward Cottage, and music composed in response to that material. This work imagines and connects to the stories that might be held not only in the walls of the cottage, but also the land it is (and was originally) built on, and the materials that were used to build it. I see this as an act of exchange with the Cottage – it seeks to release some of what may be hidden or trapped in the walls, while also offering more to be absorbed.

What is trapped in these walls are futures that could not become. Future elders of the Wallumedegal, futures of the Weavers-Taylor family at Westward, the future of my own lost love. The land, the cottage, may be the only surviving witness to those once-hoped for futures.