In The Words of Australian World-Renowned Soundscape Artist Steve Weis
When I was a small child, I looked at the world around me and wondered why things seemed to be so uniformed in the world of adults and the community I was born into. I had the feeling that creative possibilities existed everywhere and was somewhat disturbed that they were not being explored. Perhaps I was a child with an “active imagination”. On top of that, my family lived in a very small flat on top of a council owned tourist kiosk in picturesque Toowoomba, at Picnic Point which looked out over many miles of picture postcard views towards the coast and Brisbane, the capital of our state of Queensland.
As a small boy I had great freedom to visit the wilds of the bush and explore the vista of the steep basalt escarpment and beautiful geological features that held, for me, great intensity of the presence of the aboriginal spirit of the place. On my escape wanderings I found special places where there was a sense of the aboriginal dreaming still present and it awoke in me a hunger for the kind of meaning I felt indigenous life had contained, and which I found lacking in the culture of my town, my school and the business we lived and breathed every day of the year.
This was a great place for dreaming. The views were grand and reached vast distances towards the coast. There was a lot of open sky in which to dream and imagine. I dreamt of a better world. A small boy, only a child, imagining that a new world might be born, one day, where the sense of belonging, caring and sharing might bring peace and joy, unity and love for the people of the world. It was a cherished hope. It was a wild hope. Something inside me didn’t want to let it go, no matter what. This was the birthplace of my dreaming.
My first piece of metalwork was a steel spearhead, which I attached to a spear that accompanied me on my bush exploits for many years. It was elegant and effective and greatly admired by many people which brought me encouragement to understand I had a design gift as well as hands that knew instinctively how to craft.
This carried me through into an interest in art and I studied painting, briefly attended art-college and always loved looking at creative expression. I loved the loners, people like Ian Fairweather, an eccentric artist who lived in a grass house on a beach on Bribie Island and made paintings on newspapers with paint he made himself. His works are now priceless and there are several cherished in the Australian Art Museum. As I moved into art metal and the blacksmith’s architectural work, I fell in love with the design of Gaudi in Spain, Hunterwasser, in Austria, and my all-time favorite was Simon Rodia in Watts, California.
The magnificence of his vision, the seeming impossibility of achieving it and the audacity to try to single-handedly build twelve-story towers out of discarded material from building sites qualified him as a creative saint in my personal admiration. The fact that he did so without funding and paid his costs from his meagre builder’s laboring wages impressed me to tears.
I paid homage to Watts Towers and when I saw them in real life was ever more impressed by the grandeur of his dream and the courage of his intent. By this stage of my life, I had already been a professional artist blacksmith for many years. I was primarily self-taught. I was ambitious and hard-working and managed a team of tradesmen for many years working on prestigious residences, large hotels, shopping centers and civic works across the eastern states of Australia. I employed blacksmiths from across the globe and many of my staff learnt on the job.
Personal tragedy and grief brought this phase of my career to an end and before I reached 50 years old, I closed down a huge workshop and set forth to begin another chapter, having no idea what it might be having been defined as an artist blacksmith for so many years. Little did I imagine that I would set up another steel studio and return to the craft. By this stage of my life, I was no longer interested nor able to do the grand scale projects of my past. I also became attracted to working with scrap materials, being environmentally and creatively aware.
Throughout my metalworking career, even from the earliest days at art-college, I had been fascinated by resonance, which was a by-product of blacksmithing. The sound of things fascinated me. Scrap materials carried the fascination to new levels, introducing industrial machinery parts which often came from mines and quarries. The sounds of some of these objects awoke in me a sense that healing frequencies may be able to be generated and a voyage of discovery was begun. Throughout my art metal career, I always had a strong interest and pursued many forms of natural psychological, experiential and experimental healing.
I studied a range of technologies and became certified in a whole spectrum of natural healing technologies some of which included spiritual and even shamanic methods. This flowed into the metalwork. I also realized that when I expressed some part of my damaged self, it seemed to find healing through the practice.
This synergy evolved into a personal and deeply experimental art using former mining and industrial waste metal to create sculpture that might heal my own soul and also hold the capacity to share that healing with viewers and community. By this stage of my life, I was living in a small village in the Noosa Hinterland on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. I had converted a factory site into an integrated studio/home/gallery complete with beautiful native gardens and organic orchard. Trees, water and bees are all celebrated here.
The whole place started to become a soundscape art space with healing capabilities incorporated. I continued to do some professional works that incorporated this focus, an example being a decorative screen in a prestigious Bondi Beach apartment where the underwater fantasy ironwork, forged from Stainless Steel came with special musical bows that allowed the work to be played, creating whale-song music in respect to the migrating Humpback Whales that might pass by the ocean front building.
I found great joy creating this project and finding that my theoretical intentions worked exceptionally effectively much to the amazement of the architectural construction team and the admiring neighbors. Perhaps my greatest satisfaction came relatively early in my career when I was invited by a government welfare agency to teach art metal work to a group of mature-aged, long-term unemployed aboriginal men. I was fortunate to receive a warm welcome at the regional art gallery in my hometown of Toowoomba, where we presented an exhibition of steel artworks by the twelve aboriginal men who came from various parts of the state.
Better again was that the city agreed to provide a park in the main street, adjacent to the art gallery, where we were able to permanently install a whole collection of sculpture created by the men. I invited each of the men to create a totem of an aspect of tribal life that they missed living in contemporary Australian culture.
These artworks endure as a part of the city’s identity and honor the ancestors and that aboriginal dreaming I experienced as a small boy visiting the ancient places in the wild bush beyond my childhood home. It also holds identity for the many thousand aboriginals from the Stolen Generations who have precipitated from their ancestral lands to the larger rural city and regional center. Quite recently, almost 40 years later, I was thrilled to have a phone call from one of these men. He told me how it had changed his life.
He had discovered his art and his identity and gone on to have successful art exhibitions in the United States where his paintings hang in a Harvard collection and sold out in Japan and Italy. This is my proudest achievement at the personal level as it assisted good men to find their gifts and values that led some of them onto much greater lives than they might otherwise have known. Over my more than 40 years working as an artist exploring paint, forged steel, scrap metal, environmental and horticultural methods in combination with deep inner work including Holotropic Breathwork, Past Life Regression, Gestalt Therapy and KaHuna Massage the single most important factor has been the quest for authenticity and personal discovery.
Embedded in this life has also been an instinct for spiritual and shamanic healing practices. These factors are currently gelling into new ways of working as an experiential artist and also as an intuitive healer. A good example of this new field of exploration is a piece of work made about 2013 after a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii, where I visited King Kamehameha’s Homestead at O’Honanau. There I saw and heard the meaning of the Pu-U-Honua, or sacred refuge. It was a place of forgiveness and redemption in the old Hawaiian tradition.
This experience inspired me to build a Pu-U-Honua O-Kin Kin as I felt that my village also had a need for a sacred refuge and a place of forgiveness and redemption. From a couple of discarded illuminated signage frames from a big shopping center, along with other recycled materials, I built what many people thought was a bus shelter. Drawing on my many years of exploring the sound qualities of welded construction, I used a principle I call resonance engineering through which I harness the resonance of the whole construction in order to being about a harmonic- integrated artefact. What sets it apart from any bus stop, is that it can be played as a musical instrument either bowed or struck with mallets. Bowing is my preferred method of playing.
I like to take viewers and lay them down on the raised floor of tuned boards where they are invited to close their eyes and go on an inner journey. I begin to bow elements of hardened steel that make the whole structure vibrate with sound emissions. By exploring various positions, a vast range of sound effects are produced, and these are conducted through the body of the recipient. The bowing explores all the various elements of the construction in a full surround-sound experience of harmonic frequencies and some rattling effects add highlights to the experience. Most who have had this experience describe it as being like nothing else they have ever experienced. Most agree that it seems to have an overall meditative-healing quality to it.
It provides a deep meditative state which sometimes takes people some time to fully return from and most agree that it has a very calming and stilling impact on their sense of self. As my wife, Janka and I have both worked in intuitive healing with clients over many years, this is the focus of my art at this time. Our property also hosts many healing and wellness workshops into which the sound sculpture fits seamlessly. We have also found that the sound sculpture and the gallery environment is very conducive to spiritual and creative learning. This is well confirmed by the number of attendees who become regular visitors for long periods after they first attended to do a course in Prana Breathing, Ho’O’PonoPono, Mayan and Incan rituals and the like.
What is emerging is an integrated art form where organic food and soil practices, regenerative land use and building restoration, creative recycling and community building and deep personal healing are all syntropic aligned for the greater good of all concerned. In essence it is evolving into the art of living consciously and coherently. One of my fundamental principles over the past twenty years is the importance of working from intentions aligned with creativity. This necessitates originality rather than reproduction of know themes and methods. In order to achieve unimagined outcomes, I have discovered that working without a target is imperative. Any target would result in a pre-imagined destination. If it can be imagined in advance there is every likelihood it is the reiteration of known work.
Starting with what is available, then developing it to achieve its most inherent virtue is my usual method. At each development I look at what might be expected and then ask what might be unexpected in order to keep the process aligned with authenticity. Sharing my process with some young people, some have appeared fearful to begin. These same folk have oft-times become excited at the discovery of freedom and the consequential joy that is born of creative revelation. I describe these methods and show examples to the many people who visit my art space on guided tours or as participants in workshops. Most seem to catch on very quickly and it appears that the approach is highly liberating for the fearfully restrained. One of my best students, Calem, started as a 14-year-old mowing my extensive lawns and later on helping with the gardens.
Now in my 70th year and feeling the impacts of many years of very heavy, sometimes extreme labor, this lad, now 25 is able to create wonderful authentic results simply by following the principal of starting with what is available and create as many surprises as possible right through to the last stroke. It appears evident that he has employed the method in the rest of his life choices and activities where he has become a most valued contributor to our village and his extended family homestead. I am well rewarded seeing my discoveries of a lifetime producing joy and diversity in subsequent generations in a way that expands the creative landscape and also the range of applications encompassing any and all life skills. The method generates ever unfolding potentialities.
It transcends repetition and fertilizes discovery. It is nourished by adversity through its principle of making the problem the feature and reaching out towards the unknowable as a guiding light.
Blessed be the Boundlessness of the Unknowable.
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