Listening with our eyes

Mama’s painting of Moorea sits on the floor waiting to be hung on a new wall. A box of family albums, along with stacks of books without a shelf. Tahitian shell necklaces from too many goodbyes. A tifaifai, hand-stitched by an aunt. The red plastic lamp from our rumpus room in Brisbane, with lopsided shade, rests on what was once Mama’s dressing table. Her hairpin. Fragments of past homes, once again transplanted.

Our new front door leads to a labyrinth of metre-wide laneways. A cacophony of tooting motor scooters from all directions. Hanoi sprawls around us. It’s been six months since we arrived. A new home, a new city, a new culture.

'Listening with our eyes' is about migration and the liminal nature of an expatriate home. Estrangement from all that is familiar carries layers of isolation. However, home cannot exist within a vacuum. It must be rooted in its environment.

The subtle effect of a veil in the images is a metaphor for the duality of home, as a site of both separation and connection; inside and outside, private and public, familiar and foreign, sanctuary and exposure, self and other, us and them. The veil is also a permeable boundary, that enables a path to interconnectedness, within and without.

'Listening with our eyes' attempts to engage a different mode of seeing, moving toward a quality of sensing via an aesthetic that subverts denotative and colonial conventions inherent in taking and viewing photographs. To encourage listening with our eyes.