WINDGATE . 2021

Windgate is a sculptural sound object, a twisted form that echoes the vertical language of a tower while opening into a portal. It can be played by the body, responding to touch, movement, and proximity through wind, chimes, drones, and low vibrating tones.

The work emerged during the 2021 lockdowns, as I walked through Melbourne’s CBD. The streets were still, almost emptied out, yet above me the skyline had changed. A dense field of residential towers had risen over the previous decade, altering the city’s scale, atmosphere, and sense of enclosure.

With a background in architecture and experience working on high density residential projects, I became more attuned to the quiet hierarchies embedded in these buildings. Access, light, views, noise, and shadow were not distributed equally. The work carries this awareness, reflecting on the estrangement and separation often felt within vertical living.

During this period, reports of towers creaking, cracking, and swaying in the wind began to surface. These architectural murmurs shaped the sonic atmosphere of Windgate, where the building’s hidden anxieties return as breath, vibration, and signal. Rather than rising upward like a conventional tower, the structure bends and loops into itself, quietly resisting the logic of height, status, and separation.

Made from repurposed foiled Perspex, Burel wool offcuts, plywood, resin, and microcomputers, the work invites touch and shifts visually as the viewer moves around it. Its reflective surface creates a lenticular effect, while wool partially veils the entrance to the portal. As a participant’s hand moves through the fibres, an interactive system developed with musician and sound designer Jonathon Griggs activates the soundscape, allowing the object to respond as if alive.

In 2022, Windgate was presented at MPavilion through Windgate Sings the City, an immersive live performance developed with Jonathon Griggs and Aarti Jadu. For this iteration, recordings of creaking and cracking sounds reported by high rise residents were folded into the sculpture’s soundscape, bringing these hidden urban vibrations into the public realm. A commissioned poem by Tess Maunder accompanied the project, adding another layer of social and spatial reflection.

Windgate brings the body into contact with architecture, transforming the tower from a symbol of distance into an object of listening, touch, and resonance.