Joel Spring

WORK: Hearing, Loss




"Throughout the late 1980's and early 90's Otitis Media was a leading health issue for indigenous kids, affecting language development, attendance and other outcomes. A group of indigenous women lead the charge on this issue by implementing a screening program for kids that become a research project for best practices Australia wide. I myself had consistent ear infections for the first 3-5 years of my life, as is the common story in our communities both urban and remote, and unfortunately continues today. I feel that the children who were treated in this program, and the programs it influenced, have these women to thank for something most people including myself have take for granted, that we can hear clearly."

"Aboriginal children have the highest rates of Otitis Media, a middle ear infection that causes hearing loss, than any other people in the world.”
Bulging ear drums and hearing loss, Amanda Leach, The Conversation, 2016.

Sydney-based Wiradjuri artist Joel Spring’s Hearing, loss comprises recorded conversations between the artist and his mother, prominent researcher, educator, activist and Indigenous health worker Juanita Sherwood. The conversations cover her work treating Otitis Media, an inflammatory disease of the middle ear that can cause profound hearing loss. Otitis Media afflicts Aboriginal children at higher rates than any other people in the world, and Spring and Sherwood have both suffered from the disease.

The recorded dialogues have been treated with a series of sonic manipulations that attempt to reproduce the disruptive effect of Otitis Media on auditory function. On two opposing walls, we see large projections of Spring and Sherwood’s tympanic membranes (eardrums), captured through an otoscope (a medical device used to look into the ears), vibrating synchronously with their listening.

In merging the discursive with the physiological, the work demonstrates the inextricable bond between one's literal capacity to hear and to speak and to be heard. These are interlinked sites of struggle, and the pivot on which the title’s double meaning rests, signalling both ‘loss of hearing’, and the ‘hearing of loss’.

Documentation