Nightline Dayscatter (amongst embroidered text and tent work by Vilma Bader) in Ineffable, at Balmain Town Hall, Jan 20-24 and Feb 17-22, 2025 organised by WeiZen Ho

Ineffable was an open group process in which 9 artists worked in the Balmain Town Hall over 2 separate weeks in Jan/Feb 2025, each ostensibly doing our own thing, but inevitably running into, onto and over each other, making accidental and sometimes more deliberate spontaneous collaborations. The 9 artists were from different disciplines - music, electronic sound, performance and visual art: WeiZen Ho, Alan Schacher, Christine Simpson, Daniel Lopez Lomeli, Hirofumi Uchino, Josh Shipton, Linden Braye, Margaret Roberts and Vilma Bader.

Initially I resisted the title, Ineffable, on the grounds that we can always try to talk/write about anything, despite knowing that writing/language does not perfectly repeat its subject. But I came to accept it as referring to the actual materialities of our actions and productions that is not itself captured or destroyed, but is rather translated into representation, whether into verbal language or photography. As there was little pre-planning discussion among all the artists, the events and productions of the two weeks we worked side by side turned out to be primarily their materiality, with little translation into verbal language at the time. Discussions were held later, some written and published here.

Although one initially suggested direction for the group project was to challenge habitual decision making, I am too committed to the ongoing challenge of engaging with new physical spaces to see that as problematic or habitual. What I noticed about the architectural space of the Balmain Town Hall was its imposing stature, designed to communicate our secondary position as inhabitants of the floor. There, on the floor, we see what I understood at the time as unusually narrow floor boards, each 36mm wide. Later I discovered this is also a standard width for masking tape, making me think that there may be an arena of building materials I'm yet to learn about.

The floor board line I began to make also emerged from the work context I found myself in—amongst the work processes of the 8 other artists. After buying 36mm masking in all the colours I found at the hardware store (blue, green, beige), I spent an afternoon laying out a scatter of semi-random lengths of tape along semi-random lengths of floor board throughout the room. Towards the end of the day there was discussion among artists as to whether we wanted to start affresh next day or leave things out as they were after the day's activities. This lead me to think of collecting the scatterings of tape together for the night, discovering that they together made a line a little shorter than the length of a whole floor board running from the front's balcony to the back's stage.

I then repeated this process of scattering during the day and retreating into a line for the night, being aware this was reflecting the diurnal movement of people, birds and sun, though not reflecting the patterns of the other work processes going on around me which did not look so intentionally (or simplistically) repetitive as my night line and day scatter did. In fact I became slightly concerned about my apparent lack of innovative inventiveness that artists are meant to display, and which our group's challenge to 'habituation' might have been directed towards or influenced by. I hoped that if the repetition went on for long enough others may also see its reflection of the larger environment that I imagined I saw, and the way that repetition can create a wholeness more than a sequence of differences. I thought instead of sound works of La Monte Young and John Cage whose 'single works' are designed to go on for very long periods of time.

Nightline Dayscatter in Ineffable, at Balmain Town Hall, Jan 20-24 and Feb 17-22, 2025 organised by WeiZen Ho