About
Please note: This tour will start at Ngāmotu House at 9:45am and travel back into the gallery.
Join Anna Briers, Kaitakatū – Senior Curator Len Lye & Contemporary Art, for a focused encounter with selected works in Direct Bodily Empathy – Sound, Signal, Feedback. Accompanied by artist Simon Ingram, and Phil Dadson from artist collective Weather Cry, the tour will commence overlooking the wind-activated aeolian harps on the Len Lye Centre rooftop where we will consider what it means to ‘deep listen’ to the weather as a warning siren of ecological balance gone awry—a means of registering climate volatility through sound.
Moving to the Gallery, audiences will immerse in Simon Ingram’s Vibrating World: Rotokare Forest, 39.45254° S, 174.41727° E (2026) a work which conjures the sounds of an eco-system reclaiming its voice, and Yuko Mohri’s Decomposition (2026) an acoustic sculptural assemblage of sensors and decomposing fruit that produces light and sound energy.
Audiences are invited to attune with more-than-human phenomena such as weather, decomposing fruit, and native birdsong as co-composers and artistic collaborators, considering how sound can act as a material force of consequence in the world through the lens of acoustic ecologies and alternative energy.
Bio:
Anna Briers is Senior Curator Len Lye and Contemporary Art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre. In 2025 she also curated the BEYOND Sector for sculpture and spatial installation at Melbourne Art Fair; the Melbourne Art Foundation Commission; and These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature at the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum
Image: Weather Cry (Phil Dadson and James McCarthy) Aeolian harps: Ethereal #1, Ethereal #2, 2026. laminated sustainable pine, birchwood ply, polystyrene analogue-audio-tape boxes, steel piano pegs, hardwood bridges, marshmallow contact mics, nylon, wire, steel, rubber, paint, 12-channel audio mixer, dimensions variable. courtesy of the artists, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Whakatāne. Image: Cheska Brown.