Breath leaves my body,
moves through the silver, and
travels as vibration throughout the room.
Sound waves bounce off floors and walls,
brushing the architecture before
reaching the audience.

From Breath unfolds through a sustained exchange between breath, body, the materiality of silver and the surface of the canvas. The work centres breath as a shared, life-giving force, enacted through a giant, hand-crafted silver flute.

In this second iteration, presented live at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the Infinite: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2024, the work moved from the privacy of the studio into a public, durational setting. Across a series of seven daily hour-long performances, I played the flute while moving around a square black canvas placed on the floor, drawing its tip across the surface as I exhaled. Each movement leaves a fine trail of silver in its wake—the trace of a breath made visible in the silverpoint line. Each breath travels through the silver flute, vibrating outward, producing sound. Breath, body, sound, movement and material become inseparable.

The flute is a simple tube with a single embouchure hole. Without keys or mechanisms, sound and variation emerge entirely through breath and the shaping of the mouth.

The work develops through repetition. Circling the canvas, I return again and again to the same path. Subtle variations register over time. What unfolds is a durational, ritual act—physical and attentive—where breath becomes both measure and generative force.

In this context, the work unfolds in relation to an audience: the gradual accumulation of the drawing becomes perceptible over time, while sound moves through the surrounding space. Breath leaves my body, travels through the silver and into the room as vibration, brushing the architecture before reaching the listener. When it enters the ear, it sets the tiny hairs in motion, translating breath into sound within another body. Breath becomes a shared, atmospheric presence—an invisible tether between bodies, held in resonance.

As the drawing forms, the flute is altered. Its tip wears down through contact with the canvas, becoming softened and rounded. The instrument is not only a tool but a participant in the work, undergoing its own quiet transformation.

The work draws on a lineage of breath passed to me through my mother, a classically trained singer, who taught me how the voice begins deep in the body. This inheritance is deeply embodied—held in muscle memory, diaphragm and pulse. Breath is an invocation: an ongoing act of calling the self into being.

What remains are three interrelated forms: a large-scale silverpoint drawing, a sound recording, and the flute. Each holds a different register of the same process—visual, sonic, material—together tracing a durational, embodied encounter shaped by breath.