Ruins in reverse (2024)

Mixed media sculptural and audio installation: Concrete, pine, particle board, MDF, perspex, castors, acrylic paint, oxides, adhesives, speakers and multi-channel soundscape composed in collaboration with Edwina Stevens. Dimensions variable (each sculpture approx 40 x 40 x 170cm).

'Ruins in Reverse' is a sculptural and sonic installation by Carly Fischer that responds to the site and surrounds of the former Beechworth Asylum, instigated by connections to her great-grandmother's 50-year life spent at the asylum for 'talking to the furniture.' Taking this notion of slipping between realities as a point of departure, the installation considers the material agency of the asylum's architecture to create alternate narratives of place through its accumulated traces and tones. Drawing on the current site as a peripheral zone or ruin within the town, the installation resurrects some of the forgotten fragments that have been left to accumulate and merge, slipping between past and present contexts and forming incidental, tangential dialogues across institutional, architectural, geological and extractive mining histories throughout Beechworth. Tracing the architectural peripheries of the asylum buildings, the installation records the sculptural and sonic resonance of its infrastructure and interconnected surroundings, reconstructing these traces and tones into 'architectural assemblages' that shift between sculptural and sonic form, materiality and context.

Drawing on improvisational processes of wandering as an alternate form of historical research, the work reflects on the connections and overlaps between histories that arise through durational engagement with places. Without access to much of the asylum's interior, as a strange inversion to those once inside, walking the periphery became a way of reflecting on the confinement of the architecture, looking and listening through its traces and tones. Slipping between materialities, rust on white-painted timber window frames revealed metal bars hidden beneath. Forgotten furniture and architectural alterations merged between institutional contexts, motioning to the site's alternate institutional history as a university facility. The sound of rain funnelling through the building's architecture, re-directed down verandah posts to underground pipes throughout the gardens, became a way of articulating its resonance sonically and spatially and also paralleled the funnelling away of people through extractive asylum histories. Behind the asylum's eroded concrete facade, exposed bricks emerged like hidden wounds, drawing connections to the site of Lake Sambell, once an open-cut gold mine where the clay for the bricks was quarried. Now filled with water, Lake Sambell reflects the asylum on the hill above like a feedback loop. Walking the periphery of the lake, the waterways that now feed into it reveal traces of the water races that were cut into the hill, re-directing water from the nearby rivers and streams to the mine for extracting gold.

The installation 'Ruins in Reverse' references these overlaps through reconstructing architectural, institutional, mining and geological traces sourced from Beechworth Asylum and its surrounding environment into sculptural assemblages that slip between form and materiality, merging found fragments with subtle reconstructions in cast concrete, wood, perspex and acrylic paint. Hidden inside each sculpture is a soundscape that moves between sculptures and around the space, recorded and developed in collaboration with sound artist and frequent co-collaborator Edwina Stevens. Each soundscape draws on sounds recorded around the peripheries of the asylum and surrounding environment, such as the sound of water resonating through architectural infrastructure and the peripheries of the nearby Lake Sambell connected to the asylum, synthesised into resonant drones and overlapping feedback loops. A specific sonic technique called 'brick walling' has been used to draw a connection to the architecture of the asylum, whereby the dynamic frequencies of recorded sounds are confined and controlled, resulting in sounds extracted from their original source.

Presented as part of the Beechworth Biennale 2024 in the asylum's Chapel of the Resurrection, the installation 'Ruins in Reverse' specifically connects to the site's former history as a morgue and current site as a Chapel of Resurrection. Material traces and tones from the asylum's architectural periphery are reconstructed through sculptural accumulations that rise from the site and merge with the materiality and acoustics of its architecture through sounds resonating through the sculptures and around the space. As a site-specific installation, 'Ruins in Reverse' invites viewers to reflect on the alternate dialogues and living histories generated through the peripheral, material resonance of the asylum and its surroundings, extending these conversations throughout Beechworth.