Susie Dureau

Susie Dureau’s 'Soundscape' series translates the sounds of the landscape into vibrant visual celebrations of the earth and its creatures. Each piece is constructed with several digital layers of spectrographs – scientific graphs that convert recorded sound data into visual maps indicating frequency. The recordings have been made in and around the Sydney coastline.

The 'Soundscape' prints are composed via digital collage, layering spectrogram data from different days across the year to form compositions that encapsulate cycles of time and events in the coastal landscape. Neither abstract nor representational, the sound forms act as landscape motifs in the compositions. A representational landscape narrative emerges in each composition, partly by chance, partly due to aesthetic choices that reference painting conventions such as atmospheric perspective, horizon line and colour fields.

'Powerful Owl, NSW' translates the haunting night call of Australia’s largest owl into visual form. The artwork references data gathered from a sound recording of the owl in Loquat Valley, Pittwater. Its inverted teardrop shape mimics the appearance of the owl’s distinctive ‘hoot’ – a sound that draws up and opens out to make a bulging form on a spectrogram.

Susie Dureau was awarded a Creativity Grant by the Northern Beaches Council in 2022 for the development of these 'Soundscape' artworks.