A long term collaboration between Grace Ferguson and Rudi Williams, Breath (2019-2022) is the development of a work, originally made as visuals to accompany Ferguson’s live performance at The Melbourne Recital Centre in 2019. The title Breath was chosen by Williams after listening to a live broadcast of Ferguson performing on the radio and noticing how her breath intersected with her compositions, connecting the score to the ambient sounds in her immediate surroundings. This tension between the planned and practiced and what remains out of our control inspired the construction of the visuals for the initial version of Breath in 2019.
Breath is an 18 minute track that includes the original voice memos recorded by Ferguson in 2019, followed by a recording made by Jesse Oberin in Ferguson’s bedroom in 2017, leading to a recording from Ferguson’s 2020 album Voler. To mirror this blend of high and low fidelity material, the film combines observations filmed on Super 8 and digital formats, constructed to move in and out of alignment with Ferguson’s combination of improvised and rehearsed recordings.
Initiated while Ferguson and Williams were living together in 2019 and 2020 Breath is inspired by both artists’ considerations of the synthesis and translation between sound and light and the connection between context, memory and storytelling. Made while Ferguson was constructing her 2020 album Voler, the film considers the tensions that both artists work with in their daily lives and practices. Filtered through metaphor and repetition, to create a work that reflects on the ambient space between all of us and our environments.