swaying in unknowability an ecopoetics of sonic sensing that has been gathered through a forest of practitioners (marine biologists, educators, artists, decolonial storytellers) who submerge themselves to listen with kelp. this listening beyond hearing critically attunes past the edges of knowability and into a relational encounter that interfaces yearning and release, yet is often difficult to word when back on land again. contributors to the sound clip include: breath, Loyiso Dunga, St James Tidal Pool’s porous boundaries, Vivienne Bozalek, spit, mouth, Nasreen Peer, heart, Aaniyah Omar-Martin, snapping shrimp colonies, photosynthesising bubbles of kelp forests, kelp forests, Joanne Peers, the “cape doctor” rains, the many unnamed who are picked up through their vibrational communication outside of hearing range, the unending hole of more.
The Weight of Vastness in the Agulhas Current for the Aquatic Surfaces and Depths: Haunted Shores
Haptic Sensing in Camissa the Kelp Forests, an online 'rockpool' meeting discussion and listenign session in the TBA21's Ocean com/uni/ty. "Artist and science communications researcher Meghan Judge, in conversation with Camissa-based kelp ecologists and decolonial storytellers Nasreen Peer and Loyiso Dunga By looking at the haptic "haptera" of the kelp forest’s holdfast, they consider what can be learned from this nurturing environment for sensing life and reorienting within oceanic relations. They engage limits of knowability, the potentials of strangeness in the known unknowns, and a transcendental language of scale and enchantment that ecosystems within ecosystems can offer for listening beyond hearing. If you can, bring headphones for immersive listening"
Interlude of Intrusions a sonic collapse that lets fall multiple mothering slippages where converging temporalities of becoming disrupt the demands of progressive linear time, losing pace with scholarship and proposing instead a noisy lullaby that soothes the freying edges of what has to be passed through. made for the panel traces we leave upon the earth for the project womens work in artistic practice
static ocean “Static Ocean” is a talk that looks to the diversification of sensory acoustic perceptions by presenting a listening experience of the sound of static as a site for challenging human exceptionalist, terra-centric myths and narratives about relationships. By locating itself in the ocean, the talk inquires into static as a noise that accompanies searching for and receiving signal in a multiplicious world. In the ocean, various ongoing activities of water and weather are present, making it possible to listen to deep time cycles that offer a disjoin from the singular notion of time as a linear progression that colonized and capitalized land-based knowing. Listening to static from the ocean provides a material-affective encounter within the ringing of vast presences and temporalities in the present. It also proposes an intimate attunement to the “self-noise” that clammers when attempting to stand in such presences, to be with static. Through sensing sonically, the talk scales in noisy relations, searching for how to perceive what is present while attending to the politics of discomfort that rise from perception binaries. In this, relations of care shape with what sounds in presence, wherein the present becomes an attunement to presence. The talk proposes ways of moving toward finding rest whilst standing within such presence, and finding ways of making meaning through performing this knowledge as it coalesces.
Inside Flashing Eyes is a performative presentation for the Mirror Institution and Konstnärsnämnden IASPIS International Artist Studio Programme in Sweden that takes its lead from listening to come into relationships on a planetary scale. it stems from ongoing research by curator Joanna Sandell and artist Meghan Judge into barn swallows who navigate paths of flight between South Africa and Sweden. these birds teach about orientation through radical pairs, damaged lands, and ecological sensing beyond sight. the work presented here takes up difference to draw various practitioners together into a multi-sensory sonic potential for receiving each other across various situated, spectral and spheric emissions.
in this mucus you ponder seeds ecopoetry commissioned by TBA21's Ocean Archive that churns within deep sea activities that reorient the senses toward amphibious potentials, shaping a trans-corporeal poesis of oceanic relations. the writing draws from my embodied encounters with sonic and elemental weather phenomena experienced whilst traversing up the Agulhas current in the highly sensitive western Indian Ocean. from here, I confesses through volumetric pressures, elemental media and strange becomings that rearrange my perceptions. within the shoreless ocean of my internal and external worlds, binary lines mutate into wave forms and words slip along them, playing away from terra-biased comforts and trajectories of separateness. as writing finds its from through the oceanic, a spectrology of speculative scientific sensitivities utters the unutterable reality of becoming edible, multiple, and compounded.
Sensing Sonics is an ongoing curated gathering for sonic inquiry. the sessions work with the quantum phenomenon of radical pairs where seemingly unrelated parts flash in relation. they explore the material/immaterialities encounters and the programming is open ended (with some fixed residency dates), shaping around the networks desires.
Resting Waters curating an ongoing residency for oceanic practitioners to come into rest in each others waters, following that water contains transparent memory in resonance form. this residency understands rest as critical to creativity and looks to slime, ooze and amphibiousness as forms for releasing and retaining connectivity in difference. the home for the residency is nomadic.
Static Drift is an online/interactive platform for inquiry into opening perceptions toward human-ocean relations based on my PhD dissertation and related solo exhibition.
Sense Palette: Waterline a vibrational listening attempt. discomforting silent noise. hydro vibrations, snapping shrimp, sine waves, shore waves, multispecies communities, ecotones, tech water distortions. the apparatus speaks.
Lonely Sailor Weather Report a broadcast series that emits from a weathering station. instead of broadcasting marine shipping reports out to the sailors, this station broadcasts from the lonesome sailor in the ocean back to land. the lonely sailor is caught up in the weather - has slipped out of human signal and entered into a fluid, wet zone of weathering activity. the weather broadcasts drift through multiple weathering experiments and collaborations with various practitioners and weathering agencies.
Gong Fu Sinkholes this body of work contains ongoing research that spans several years into the mysteries surrounding the narrative about the gong fu uprisings in the 1980s in Antananarivo, Madagascar. the research works with ambiguity, politicising it in the context of power while inquiring into the multiple repositories that act as archives for this multifaceted and unsettled story. this work includes my MA dissertation but spills over its edges to before and after as it traces paths through the multiple conflicting stories relating to this narrative found by being present in the Analakely Market in Antananarivo.
SIRA curation of a virtual residency that acts like salt, allowing seemingly disparate parts to release and find each other, crystalising into shapes of their own making. SIRA undoes colonial and political divides that were especially heightened in the 2020 pandemic.
ANAE Facilitation and curation of cultural exchanges between artists in the Western Indian Ocean and the African continent between 2014-2019
The Tunnel of Us is a site-specific project that engaged with people’s place-making in the congested Tunnel Ambanidia in Antananarivo, Madagascar. it explores place-making in urgent environments that open slow portals to homes through marks of presence. it critically plays into this by sending messages out and waiting for a response.
The Long Minute: Behind the Scenes revitalising old work by adding new sounds in an experimental short film for Willaim Kentridge's The Long Minute.
Restless Winds this tree in Antsiranana sounds the relentless South East trade wind that blows constantly between May to October. working through the material and emotional landscapes of making in high winds, the tree became a site of intimacy for gathering during the outbreak of the plague in Madagascar when all artistic organising came to a halt. artists were invited to pay homage to the winds through an immersive sound experience by sending sounds or moods that I then matched with objects found in the area and dangled in the whistling tree.
_PNG.png)
Desert Season 3 of William Kentridge's Center for the Less Good Idea for curator Lindiwe Matshikiza script titled 'Desert'. I worked with light and animation attempting to keep with a tactile analog "fake magic".
Sound Lines working from materiality, memory, and feeling, the silent sounds and hidden scapes found in these compositions of machine error draw from the experience of being out on the ocean in high weathering activity whilst traversing the Cape of Storms and then up the Mozambican channel in the Indian Ocean to Mayotte.
Lost Lover a collaborative film and sonic performance responding to Dion Monte's nostalgia sound recordings that played with making a collective philosophy of the archetype 'The Lost Lover'. Music by Dion Monti, Performed by Dion Monti, Choreography by Llewellyn Mnguni, Video processing and projection by Meghan Judge, Lighting design by Gretchen Blegen This project formed apart of WRITING FOR THE EAR, WRITING FOR THE EYE curated by Bettina Malcomess and Bhavisha Panchia at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Season 3
Harp Space an ode to play, Harp Space invited visitors of all ages to immerse themselves in sensory sound exploration. the sonic sculpture asked visitors to stay a while, opening their senses toward the perceptive shifts that emerge as they touch light, feel tones and move with resonance. Conceptualised by Meghan Judge and implemented by Thingking with sound guidance by Brendan Bussy. The works were made for Spier Light Art festival.
Scapes drawing from memory of being adrift in the Western Indian Ocean, this performance explores feelings that shifted whilst at sea traversing through cyclonic eddies (large circular patches of peaceful waters and clear skies that are surrounded by towering clouds and storms). it is within these movements from outside edges to center and through that orientation and navigation could occur. through salt and water, I relate this chaos-to-calm to the internal shifts that occurred within me whilst traversing these seascapes, and how I remain affected by this today.