Installation

Recent audiovisual, sound installation and mixed media work produced in collaboration with Solange Kershaw.

Jemalong Sculpture Garden

The Jemalong Interactive Sculpture garden was produced with residents and staff at the Jemalong Residential Village, Dementia Unit in Forbes, NSW, Australia. 

Over the month of January 2017 artists, Damian Castaldi and Solange Kershaw worked at the Jemalong Residential Village to develop the work, which they then produced in their home studio in Kandos.

The artists had meetings and workshops with residents and were advised and helped by staff members Krystyna Anderson, Janet Hannon, Merryl Morris, Gwen Barnard, Dean Martyn and Christine McMillan, the Arts OutWest Arts and Health Coordinator.

Play for Time

A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Exposé Program exhibition, ‘Play For Time’ is a series of audiovisual installations that invites the audience to engage with responsive text, music, nature morte and sound through playful, time based, interaction, recasting the visitor from passive observer to active writer, player, creator. The installations are centered around the assemblage of mixed media, acoustic, electronic and sampled material, the aesthetics of which have became the artist’s domain. The ‘play’ element is reminiscent of Pierre Schaeffer and the ‘Musique Concrète’ movement within which the word jouer (to play) carried a double meaning: ‘to enjoy oneself by interacting with one’s surroundings’, as well as to operate a musical instrument’

And so, without visitor participation the installations will exist simply as an old typewriter, a bunch of mechanical wooden boxes and some old kitchen twine.

Whispering Trees

Whispering Trees is a storytelling project conceived as public sound installation by Solange Kershaw and Damian Castaldi in conjunction with five local Blue Mountains writers and poets: Craig BillinghamEmma BrazilAmanda KayeVanessa Kirkpatrick and Mark O’Flynn and our project partner, Varuna, The Writers’ House.

The project was supported by the Blue Mountains City of the Arts Trust Cultural Grants Program 2014 and was installed in the gardens of Varuna on 16 – 17 May, 2015 as part of Sydney Writers Festival and Carrington Place, 22 May to 1 June, 2015 as a public sound installation along the walkway to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre.

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An audio-visual display permanently installed at Villa Alba on the 4th of April 2014. The work lifts a corner on the memory of the Villa Alba using text, sound design and video to create a space of things remembered, not by us, but by the walls and rooms. As we enter the installation we watch and listen as the lavish contents of the house pass through the curtains, their descriptions floating on a dark surface, illuminated by the window beyond. Using the 1897 Auction catalogue as its narrative this work focuses on the house’s lavish “aesthetic and artistic” furnishings, described in the catalogue’s introduction as “Superb and costly high-art furniture of the most beautiful description…”. The house today seems filled with mystery, and some of this is slowly being unraveled as more and more of the interiors are revealed. This is what is most compelling, the slow, fastidious process of history being discovered and retold.

The Memory Pendulums

A motion sensitive sound Installation affected by contact and gravity, the Memory Pendulums modulate the spoken measure of a poem, written for the artwork by the Australian poet Jill Jones. Her words flow randomly in time with the playful swinging back and forth of three diamond shaped acrylic water pendulums. Each one filled to a different capacity with a toxic blue liquid, triggering a different memory, dripping into (and polluting) the muddy waters of the Parramatta River …..

The Memory Pendulums was installed in May 2010 as part of the MEMORY FLOWS group exhibition at the Armory Gallery, Newington Armory, Sydney Olympic Park and is a project of the Centre for Media Arts Innovation, UTS. With special thanks to the Curators Sophia Kouyoumdjian, Norie Neumark and Deborah Turnbull.

Play 44

A touch sensitive sound and photomedia installation at the Villa Alba Museum in Melbourne exhibited as part of Reverie exhibition curated by Sarah Parker.

Play 109

Play 109 is an interactive sound, video and graffiti installation by Damian Castaldi & Solange Kershaw  in collaboration with the artist/programmer Neil Jenkins and Jake Lewis of the Amerg Collective.