Their voices inscribe marks into time and space, 2026.

Who speaks beneath the roar of the Anthropocene?

Within a landscape of language, voices echo across deep time. Marks trace a story of slow becoming and swift unbecoming. 

Their voices inscribe marks into time and space reflect encounters between the artist and the endangered bird, the Carnaby's Cockatoo, known in the Noongar language as Ngoolarks. As a form of co-creation, recordings of Ngoolarks' vocalisations instruct in the visual formation of the works, with captures of the spectral frequency display of the Ngoolark voices layered to create a projected meditative film, while prints archive their vanishing language. Accompanied by audible conversations of the Ngoolarks, Their voices inscribe marks into time and space explores interspecies dialogue, the fragility of voices and their material presence.

In the present, under the illusion of progress is a legacy of environmental crisis and mass extinction in a time known as the Anthropocene. The roar of the Anthropocene threatens to silence many voices, not limited to that of the Ngoolark - a bird with ancestral voices who spoke 28 million years ago.¹ Devastated by mass clearing of their habitat and food sources since colonisation, Ngoolarks risk extinction in the next 20 years if action is not taken.² The suffering of the Ngoolarks reflects broader ecosystem suffering and a fragility of life, which humans are not separate from.

Their voices inscribe marks into time and space anticipates the potential of curiosity, wonder and an endeavour to make kin with the charismatic species through a practice of seeking, spending time with and listening to.

As a male Ngoolark bows to his bonded life partner, the work anticipates the potential of interspecies communication to cultivate wonder, empathy and reciprocity, through a remembrance of a kinship and our fundamental sameness; that we both share and speak the languages of pain and love.

Work as part of FAM+26 (group show) | Cullity Gallery, UWA | [2026]

Exhibition catalogue available here.

Trace paper prints 297cm x 210cm

Multi-channel animated projection (4-minute loop), three-channel spatial sound, sheer textiles ‍ ‍

1. White, Nicole E., Matthew J. Phillips, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, et al. “The Evolutionary History of Cockatoos (Aves: Psittaciformes: Cacatuidae).” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (United States) 59, no. 3 (2011): 615–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2011.03.011.

2. Jane Hammond, "The Cockatoo Crisis." SBS, 2022.