works & commissions
Public art exhibitions and installations developed in partnership with communities and cultural institutions. My work brings multi-sensory storytelling methods to every installation and experience. Much of this work is delivered through Studio ESEM (formerly Esem Projects).
An immersive exhibition in Gathang voices and language at Port Macquarie Museum, introducing audiences to Birpai Country and its stories of kinship, culture and environment. Created by Aunty Rhonda Radley with Studio ESEM (Sarah Barns and Michael Killalea) and Andy Noonan. Sound mastering by Peter Hird. Features the Ngarrgan Mirriiyn Choir (recorded by Eliza Sayer), a Deep Listening reflection by Mirrilyn Gill, and a narrative reflection by Aunty Rhonda Radley.
Digital artworks for the opening of Western Sydney International Airport, made by Studio ESEM with AX Interactive. They include Come On. Let's Play, an interactive dance work with dancers filmed across Western Sydney; The Street Beneath Our Feet, a durational work celebrating the dance culture of Greater Western Sydney; and Unboxing Aviation Archives, a six-screen display drawn from aviation archives, including Nancy-Bird Walton's 1935 barnstorming tour; and Wings of Desire.
A gesture-based public interactive in Haymarket with the Art Gallery of NSW, inviting passers-by to visualise themselves inside Cao Fei's speculative digital landscapes, blending the artist's worlds with the street.
A data civics program siting STORYBOX portals across the precinct, portraits and workshops starting from shared storytelling, to ask what kinds of data and indicators emerge from a more speculative approach to precincts with purpose.
Video portraits of Australians building climate solutions, community changemaker interviews and network visualisations mapping patterns of resilience, shown in-gallery alongside an AI-driven artwork. Includes the Future Now Makers portrait series.
An interpretive artwork for Sydney's new Gadigal Metro Station, made with Gadigal poet Joel Davison, artist Travis de Vries and motion designer Andy Noonan, a visual and poetic meditation on connection to the city, past, present and future.
Interviews recorded on the water with Uncle Andrew Gardiner (Wurundjeri Elder, Birrarung Council), Charity Mosienyane (Lead Convenor, Regen Melbourne) and Dr Erin O'Donnell (University of Melbourne, Birrarung Council), on stewardship, river connection and restoration of the Birrarung, composed into an audio work.
STORYBOX touring program with the Australian Museum for the John and Elizabeth Gould Birds of Australia exhibition. Gould's illustrations animated on outdoor screens across regional NSW, with First Nations storytelling and a mobile pledge experience. Winner of the Digital Interpretation Award, Interpretation Australia, and commended by the National Trust of Australia (NSW) for Events, Exhibitions and Tours.
Emu projection program with Clarence Valley Council, carrying local stories and species across the built fabric of the valley. Artworks by Gumbaynggirr, Yaegl and Bundjalung artists celebrating the endangered coastal emu, projected onto the Sunshine Sugar building at South Grafton through the Jacaranda season. Joint winner, Events, Exhibitions and Tours, 2023 National Trust Heritage Awards.
Finale experience for a five-day festival celebrating the Hunter's multiculturalism, filmed performance workshops and oral histories with Mindaribba Lands Council and Afghani, Indian, Sri Lankan, Tibetan, Samoan and Māori communities, brought alive on the river foreshore.
A moving image artwork commissioned for the launch of Museums of History NSW at the Sydney Mint. Water and sand animation, point-cloud scans and recolourised archival photography, exploring how visualisation can shift perceptions of colonial governance.
An outdoor digital exhibition of Sydney Harbour's marine world with the Australian National Maritime Museum, 28 minutes of underwater videography revealing what lies beneath the city's most famous body of water.
A connected series of STORYBOX assets across Canberra's Civic region, bringing the city's creative intelligence into the streets, programmed with the National Gallery, National Museum and National Film and Sound Archive.
Major commission for Vivid Sydney 2022, a 130-metre projection along the Powerhouse Museum, the festival's longest artwork, reimagining over 30 film and sound recordings from 1908 onwards as a collective dreamscape of the city's transformation.
Creative commission for Vivid Sydney 2021, lead storyteller and designer for a speculative portrait of the city a decade ahead, the year before We Dream the City took over the Powerhouse facade.
Over 20 audio-visual portraits of the change-makers driving transformation across Australian cities, established and emerging urban leaders on city-making, sustainable futures and legacy, produced remotely with Studio THI through the COVID lockdowns.
A permanent cultural activation at Port Macquarie's historic courthouse, led by Birpai Elder Aunty Rhonda Radley and the Ngarrgan-Mirriiyn Choir, truth-telling and weaving workshops distilled into a commemorative digital artwork situating the town's bicentenary within Birpai storytelling.
The flagship STORYBOX deployment, a two-year community storytelling platform at Parramatta Square, carrying First Nations connection, migration stories and creative lives onto a public digital cube with the ABC, City of Parramatta and Western Sydney University.
A place-based digital engagement platform grown from Studio ESEM's placemaking practice. 17+ precinct activation programs, 250+ community storytellers, $10M in leveraged place investment. Winner of two 2026 Australian Good Design Awards, Best in Class in Digital Design and Winner in Social Impact, and of the Media Architecture Biennale Award for Participatory Media and Infrastructure.
An immersive sound installation weaving site-specific archival field recordings through the canopy of living trees, premiered at Brisbane's Botanica Festival and toured to Melbourne, Vivid Sydney and regional NSW destinations.
A public art activation celebrating the many faces of Ashfield and the many journeys taken to be here, migration stories gathered from Inner West communities, typewritten, told and projected back into the streets they belong to.
Digital storytelling commissioned by Liverpool City Council to mark the Centenary of Armistice, projecting onto the buildings and shopfronts of Liverpool City. Creative workshops with students from Liverpool Girls High School surfaced personal perspectives on peace, many from families who arrived in Australia from war-torn countries and had not told their stories before, alongside archival recordings from the National Film and Sound Archive and the Australian War Memorial.
A 50-year celebration of the Petersham Water Tower, illuminating a beloved Inner West landmark with the stories of the community that grew up beneath it.
Digital storytelling project with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for the Blacktown Native Institution site, carrying the histories of one of the country's most significant First Nations sites into digital form. Built as the keeping place for personal stories and archival material within the wider Blacktown Native Institution Project, a C3West collaboration between Blacktown Arts Centre, the MCA and UrbanGrowth NSW, which won at the 2016 IMAGinE Awards, Museums & Galleries of NSW.
Immersive exhibit on the history of ideas about atomic structure, with a ten-minute video on mathematical history. Lead researcher and designer.
Major commission for the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, shipping containers transformed into memory palaces of East Darling Harbour's docklands past, combining projection, sound and participatory storytelling for over 60,000 visitors.
Major public art commission reflecting on the maritime history of East Darling Harbour, now the Barangaroo Headland. Also written up as a book chapter in Creative Placemaking and Beyond.
A decade of festival curation and audio-visual production for the Bathurst Winter Festival, one of regional NSW's longest-running collaborations between Esem Projects and a local council.
Audio-visual interpretation for the Mt Stromlo Observatory Director’s Residence restoration. Winner, Outstanding Heritage Award, National Trust ACT.
Public art commission.
A place-making program for the City of Newcastle, carrying the young studio's archival storytelling practice beyond Sydney into Newcastle's post-industrial streetscapes.
Soundscape accompanying a series of projection installations meditating on the history of the ANU campus, staged over two weeks in 2013. Written up with Shanti Sumartojo as When One Idea Led to Another in The Senses and Society.
A major Art & About commission for the City of Sydney, staged in Martin Place and Rowe Street. The work summoned the Australia Hotel and the vanished Rowe Street arcade back into the streets that replaced them, using archival recordings and voices of the people who drank, worked and shopped there. The installation is long gone, but the soundscapes survive and can still be listened to.
Negotiated the release of ABC television and radio archive material under CC BY 2.0 through ABC Pool. This moved broadcast recordings out of a closed archive and into public circulation, where they could be listened to, reused and rebuilt on. The recordings gathered here under Voices came out of this program.
A public space archive project at Millers Point with Michael Killalea of Studio ESEM. 'Girl Eating a Sandwich' plays on a loop, looking back from the 1930s docks, wondering about the future world she finds herself in.
As part of my practice-led research into the sound archives of Sydney's urban transformation I created the ABC's first mobile content experience Sydney Sidetracks. Launched in 2008 as part of the ABC's experimentation with Google Maps as a platform for publishing, Sydney Sidetracks created experiential interactions with key moments in the city's history as captured on location by ABC reporters. Developed with support from the ABC's Digital Media Unit (2008).
Nothing of that kind here yet.