A section in the programming during the first Volume Festival 2023 curated by Jonathan Wilson spotlighted artists working with Tones, Moves, Strings. Kate Brown performed in the programmed ‘Tones’ slot, in response to ‘Silueta’ series, photographs by Ana Mendieta, 1976-1978. These photographs depict performance actions in the natural landscape where Mendieta documents a trace of the body or sculptural bodies; ‘This sense of magic, knowledge and power found in primitive art has influenced my personal attitude toward art making. For the past twelve years I have been working out in nature exploring the relation-ship between myself, the earth and art.’1

Kate’s performance actions kicked off at 10:30am on the first Monday of Volume festival 2023, aiming to create a trance-like interruption, waking up the art, space and bodies situated within it. Mendieta’s ‘Silueta’ series works with ritual and endurance, pain and beauty, always harnessing a conversation between the female body and nature. In Kate’s performance practice she aims to blur the lines of the female body through presenting a sounding body responding to environments creating space for the unheard sounds the human body is capable of. As well as experimenting with extended techniques and at times technology while also collectively connecting these elements in situ, past, present, universal.. A sounding body outside of itself, almost like a trace.

With a guitar played flat on a stainless steel table and hooked up to a boss delay pedal, Kate placed crystals along the guitar neck to interact with an electromagnetic ebow placed above the guitar pickup. All of these elements keeping the harmonic feedback drone of the resonant crystals in constant flux and filling all of the open spaces and channels that make up the interconnected architectures of AGNSW. Alongside this soundscape Kate vocally engaged and tuned the cavernous space with her voice, at times mimicking sounds from the guitar/crystal interaction and also practicing extended breath and vocal techniques mustering physical energetic properties of the space and the bodies within it. Halfway through the performance, Kate introduced her electric triangle instrument, a large brass triangle instrument with a lapel microphone place inside. When blown like a flute and amplified, the feedback of the harmonics from inside the triangle turn the sound into something reminiscent of a distorted electric guitar. All of these sound elements intertwined and created a whirr and trance like effect across the performance while connecting to the ritual and otherworldliness in Mendieta’s photographs. Mendieta imposes traces of the body onto the images in ‘Silueta’ series which eerily grounds and gives the audience a sense of their own body in life and death. Kate mirrored these concepts to harness a flesh and blood and object ecology by demonstrating what a body is capable of in and out of sound.

‘Silueta’ series was exhibited in an iteration of the collection hang curated by Nick Chambers at the AGNSW, paying homage to early performance artists such as Marina Abromavic and Mike Parr as well as centrally marking the space with Ken Unsworth’s Suspended stone circle II 1974-1977.

1 Text from Mendieta’s grant application State Council on the Arts, 17 March 1982, quoted in ‘Art in America’ article by Michael Duncan, vol 87, no 9, April 1999, p 154.

‘Iowa and Oaxaca in Mexico are the sites of Ana Mendieta’s ‘Silueta’ series, in which she made templates from her body and used these to create impressions in the landscape. Sometimes these took on a ritual cast, as for example when she used fire or flowers to mark out her absent form. As a feminist, these works could be seen as enacting the effacement of women from the cultural construction of the land or as an over identification with it, as for example with the figure of an earth goddess. Mendieta herself may have been ambivalent about this. In his essay on Mendieta for the 1997 exhibition ‘Body’, Charles Merewether quotes her in one telling passage: ‘The risk was of dissolution, a yielding or trend to lose oneself in the environment instead of playing an active role in it; the tendency to let oneself go and sink back into nature.’

2. Mendieta quoted by Charles Merewether in ‘The unspeakable condition of figuration’ in ‘Body’, AGNSW, Sydney 1997, pp 155–56.

Ana Mendieta, Dates 1976-1978, printed 1991, Media category Photograph, Materials used type C photograph, Edition 5/20, Dimensions 33.6 x 50.7 cm image; 40.6 x 50.7 cm sheet, Signature & date Not signed. Not dated., Credit Purchased with funds provided by the Mervyn Horton Bequest 1997. Copyright © Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Kate Brown, Live vocal performance with guitar, boss delay pedal, rose quartz and amethyst crystals, ebow, electric triangle, lapel microphone and dynamic microphone, orange amplifier, Tones, Volume Festival 2023, curated by Jonathan Wilson, Art gallery of NSW, 2023.