Breathing Space is a new permanent sound installation for the National Museum of Australia’s Garden of Australian Dreams. It’s an oasis of quiet reverberations, revealing the calls, tremulations and deep stirrings of country.
Six areas in the garden softly pulse with human and other-than-human sounds, emanating from speakers embedded in paths and walls. In the garden’s central field, all the vibrations converge and disperse in undulating drifts of sound.
This sonic rewilding comprises choruses of frogs and cicadas, subterranean rumbles, the pop and whoosh of the Aurora Australis, women’s voices, and ethereal instrumental phrases, layered and abstracted into patterns to be heard in passing and pausing.