I had spent several years working on high density residential projects, so my relationship to these towers was not only from the street. I knew how much the experience of living inside them can change depending on height and position: the amount of light, the view, noise, shadow and distance from the ground. What interested me in Windgate was the contrast between the authority these buildings project from the outside and the fact that their structures are continually flexing and responding to forces we rarely notice.

The surface became another way of unsettling that apparent solidity. I made it from narrow blades of Burel wool interspersed with acrylic resin and reflective coloured foil. As you move around the sculpture, different parts of the reflective surface appear between the wool and the colour changes with your position, producing a lenticular effect. The hard, shifting reflections and the dense softness of the wool make the object difficult to read from one fixed viewpoint.

Inside the opening, some of the wool blades hang down like stalactites, partly hiding what is beyond them. I wanted reaching into the work to involve a little uncertainty. The hand passes through the fibres before an ultrasonic sensor detects its movement. Custom software developed with Jonathon uses that movement to change the sound coming from within the sculpture. When no one is interacting with it, Windgate still breathes, hums and occasionally vibrates, so it never feels entirely dormant.

This was the first work in which I used microcomputers to build responsiveness directly into a sculpture, and it opened up a new way of working for me with touch, sound and behaviour. I became interested in making objects that could seem to have an internal state of their own, changing according to whether someone was near them, touching them or leaving them alone. Windgate became the first of a group of sculptural sound works developed with Jonathon from the forms and atmosphere of the Melbourne skyline.

In 2022, the work developed further through Windgate Sings the City at MPavilion, with Jonathon Griggs and Aarti Jadu. Recordings connected to the creaking and cracking of high rise buildings entered the live sound work, bringing noises normally heard privately inside apartments into a shared public setting. A commissioned poem by Tess Maunder accompanied the performance.