Seth Ellis is a Senior Lecturer in Design at the Queensland College of Art, as well as a narrative artist and installation designer. ‘Sugar Ghosts’ arises out of the work that he has recently completed as 2019 Mittelheuser scholar-in-residence at the State Library of Queensland (extended to December 2020 due to COVID-19). This work investigated sound as historical material in the Library’s collections. The exhibition moves beyond cataloguing sounds, into using historical sound materials to effectively evoke a sense of history and place. Sound is a powerful trigger for individual memory; descriptions, recordings, and reconstructions of sound often form a part of our attempt, not just to describe the past, but to make the past convincing to each other—to make it present. Ghost Sounds as an exhibition is part of ongoing research into using sound as affective material in creating narrative spatial experiences in a gallery setting.
