Drawn and Twisted

At 10:15am this morning – Steve Ashby and Vicki Hallett present a sonic portrait of the heritage wool machines at the National Wool Museum of Australia.

The work explores the stages of processing wool from raw fleece into commercial products. It portrays an interweaving of the hardship and prosperity inherent to the history of manufacturing sheep’s wool from herding to shearing to finished product. The process yields the thread of comfort and warmth brought to the world in the form of clothing, jackets, blankets, and socks. It has also polluted waterways adjacent to mills where the wool is cleaned, trampled the grasslands to dust with the herding of sheep, and impinged upon the freedom and vitality of indigenous people. Drawn and Twisted is a listening towards a future in which the knowledge from as yet untold stories and perspectives is foregrounded, where a reverence for the land embraces a returned vitality to its native grassland.