The Pleasure Garden

The work investigates a nineteenth-century colonial estate whose plants, paths, boundaries and views have been cultivated to produce the appearance of a natural environment. Through field recording and transduction, it examines how introduced ecologies, disturbed ground, architecture and residual vibrations reveal histories of occupation, displacement and environmental change. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Contribution </p><p dir="ltr">The work contributes to site-responsive sound practice by treating the garden not as a stable historical setting but as an unstable field of ecological, material and temporal processes.

Recording makes perceptible vibrations and disturbances normally concealed beneath cultivated appearances, bringing different scales and histories into proximity. Rather than reconstructing the site as a coherent historical account, The Pleasure Garden proposes listening as a means of encountering what persists, disappears or remains unresolved within a modified environment. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Significance </p><p dir="ltr">The research was supported by Museums of History NSW through competitive selection as one of four practitioners in the inaugural Vaucluse House Creative and Cultural Residency.