Bronwyn Calcutt is a Melbourne artist whose practice moves in a space between music and visual art. Whilst deeply embedded in the community as a musician and choir director, she has recently made a series of explorations to open creative connections between her art-forms, researching the ways in which their abstract languages can interpenetrate and enrich each other.
Making a Painting from a Song and a Song from a Painting.
Her most recent work experiments with using the geometric patterns of pianola code to trigger the creation of pictorial space. Working intuitively with these complex markings, she evokes imaginary worlds, landscapes and entities. Certain paintings then become graphic scores in the composition of new music, cycling the work from the pictorial back to sonic again. Presenting these companion works simultaneously, the artist aims to foster an enriched sensory engagement of the viewer with the work.
Recent Work
The Pianola Collection 2023
Large works on canvas 210x180cm
Works on Paper 50x40cm:
Works on pianola paper: 50x40cm.
Paintings and their companion songs:
Artist Statement:
The Pianola Collection evolved from the fortuitous discovery of some vintage pianola rolls in an op shop.
Having played the pianola when I was a child, I decided to salvage and give new life to the rolls, repurposing them as printing stencils onto canvas. The complex markings produced then became a point of departure from which I worked intuitively.
Some works are created from scrolls printed onto large canvases, others transfer single verses onto paper, but most are developed onto the pianola rolls themselves.
Featured in this collection is a garment made of pianola roll fragments – The Song Cloak – to be worn by the Dada-esque persona of Melrose Se Lave who presides over the performance of certain paintings as scores.
Other paintings have a recorded companion song, inviting the viewer to see and hear the work simultaneously.
The collection thus sits in a terrain traversing music, visual art and performance, each arising from and woven into the other.
Bronwyn Calcutt 