This is a reading of poetry from a chapter of my PhD in geography and the creative arts. It is based on a period of fieldwork wherein I engaged with, or re-enacted, various events of therapeutic art making. Practices included painting, felting, knitting, dance therapy, poetic permaculture, and graffiti in drain tunnels. The background is composed of digitally-produced drones. The patch which produced these drones, and whose output is varied throughout the reading, is displayed as the cover art.

Visual Poetry Reading

The Sound of the Rain soundscape was created by artist-geographer Candice Boyd from testimony provided by mental health clinicians and clients of headspace Port Macquarie, following a devastating season of fires and flash flooding in 2022.  Young people already experiencing mental health problems spoke about how the disasters they had recently been through contributed to the sense of environmental doom that psychologists call ‘ecoanxiety’.  Mental health clinicians who work with these young people also spoke about their concerns for their client’s welfare in the context of climate change.

Selected participant quotations from the research were read by volunteer voice actors and combined with binaurally recorded sounds of rainfall and bird calls recorded at Associate Professor Boyd’s home in Woodend, Victoria.  

The research was funded by a Community Engagement Grant from the Melbourne Social Equity Institute at The University of Melbourne.  The original research can be accessed here:  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eip.13549

Photo Credit:  Candice Boyd

The Sound of the Rain

A soundscape produced from several audio recordings of graffiti-making and urban play in drain tunnels in Melbourne, Australia.  It is part of my PhD research project on the nonrepresentational geographies of therapeutic art practices.

'All your drains belong to us': Sonic geographies of drain art

A soundscape of permaculture practice occuring within an urban environment.  The sound reveals the radical politics of this artistic intervention by Artist as Family as they work against mainstream consumption of finite resources of energy

Food Forest Soundscape

This soundscape communicates the affective qualities of solo 5rhythms dance therapy by combining audio recordings of a dancer's contact with a dance surface with responsive musical sounds

Ekphrastic Dance Soundscape

Candice Boyd is an artist-geographer with a background in clinical psychology.  She has recently completed a second PhD in cultural geography and the creative arts at the University of Melbourne and is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow of its School of Geography.  Her interests are in the geographies of mental health, cultures of sense and movement, therapeutic spaces, rurality, and contemporary museum geographies.

Dr Candice Boyd