What story to tell? My first years were spent in a combi van free camping around Europe with parents and grandparents. Once in Australia, I picked up a recorder and made some tunes on it, adding lyrics and poems; I often played outside in bushy environs. That was the beginning of music and me. I have little memory of actual school work but I do remember the ornate, heavily detailed fan stories that my friends and I made up in order to make Battle of the Planets go that little bit further. I also remember taking one of our goats for show and tell.
I have been a performer (flute), a composer, a music theory lecturer, a special needs assistant, an English instructor, a primary school music teacher, a sound designer, an artist collaborator, a sonic arts workshop facilitator, a research assistant in community arts ethnography, a guest lecturer in education and creativity. I want to be a snare drummer in a drum line (it’s possible) and a guitarist in a metal band (in my dreams).
My curiosity in recent years has led me on a path between music and education, sound and qualitative social research, composition and cultural geography. I’ve been thinking about how the process of music production and musical creativity can enter, engage with and direct a social inquiry. At the beginning of 2012, after receiving an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) scholarship, I took up my PhD again after a long break due to chronic illness.
I’m interested in how contemporary theories of the body can address issues of subjectivity in relation to gender and chronic illness. In my PhD I’ll develop music and sonic art practices that are able to apprehend and account for the layering of subjectivity, materiality and discourse in this process. I believe critique can be a creative enterprise. I currently study under supervisors from music/cultural geography and (documentary) film studies at Monash University.