Project Site

FOSO is set to be located 4 kilometres from the township of Wentworth, adjacent to the ancient Perry Sandhills and Thegoa Lagoon. Due to the unique nature of the sandhills, they have been used as a backdrop in many films and television shows. According to geologists, the Perry Sandhills originated after an ice age (40,000 years ago) and are formed by wind erosion over thousands of years.

Project Inspiration

Bruce Munro’s Inspiration

“When I was 21 years old, I read a book called ‘Gifts of Unknown Things’ by Lyall Watson, a radical thinker operating on the margins of accepted science. In it Watson described Tia, a young girl living in the Indonesian archipelago, who possessed the magical gift of seeing sounds in colour, which I later learned is called “synaesthesia”.

It is a neurological condition in which, when one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is also activated – for instance, when a person hears music and simultaneously “sees” the sound as swirls or patterns of colour.

I was captivated by the idea of a connection between sound and colour from that day forward and have worked with the notion of a human form represented as abstracted cylinders of light in a number of ways. I first used it in a private commission made to commemorate a couple’s sixtieth wedding anniversary in 2006; and in 2010, as a fundamental concept for the installation Water-Towers. The idea of creating an orchestra of lighted columns has been lying wait in my sketchbook since 2011.

The stunning location presents the opportunity to create another community of sound, differently than I had before: an abstract installation of an entire light-responsive Symphonic Orchestra. In this installation, eighty, three and a half meter high, four-meter diameter light installations, each being a “musician,” will form the physical plan of an orchestra.

Each musician is represented by the iconic Hill’s Hoist rotary washing line, an everyday Australian object that is also a beautiful structural support to my mind. Cylindrical arrays of fibre optic cables will encircle each Hills Hoist, making it a column of light.

A control system will scroll through a rainbow of colours synchronised with a symphonic soundtrack. As the fibre optic columns change hues, viewers will experience sound translated into colour.

This installation is the result of concepts and techniques developed over a number of years and evolved from many previous works”.