BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION TERRAINS - Exhibition by Alan Cook

Next date: Friday, 13 February 2026 | 10:00 AM to 04:00 PM

7 February until 21 March 

Wash House

Building and Construction Terrains explores the links between homelessness, sound, and the built environment. Sculptures shaped from local homelessness data resonate with acoustic and electronic abstractions of recordings from a nearby construction site. Through bone conduction, subtle vibrations travel through metal, air and brick, echoing the rhythms of labour, progress and human displacement. This installation invites visitors to listen through touch, experience data as vibration and structure as sound. The work reflects on how the structures we build leave social and emotional traces of the lives impacted that endure beyond the material form.

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OPENING Saturday 7 February 2-4pm 

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Please join us to celebrate this exhibition of interactive new works. Official business will start at 2:30pm with limited bar and light hospitality available throughout the afternoon.

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Building and Construction Terrains listens backwards through a site of displacement. The installation begins near the point of completion of a group of townhouses, where the sound is most abstracted and labour is submerged. As sonic abstraction is stripped away it gradually returns towards the original conditions and the tenants of the previous buildings. Listening backwards becomes an act of clarification rather than recollection and exposes the processes behind the architectural outcome.

What is the role of the sculpture? Each sculpture encodes sets of variables that shape how the field recordings from the site are transformed. Through it, the resulting works carry traces of their origins. The site, the data and its narrative, and the sound of the machine. It ties it all together.

Experiment with the Bone Conduction speakers (BC). They are magnetic. Place them against various surfaces within the room, yourself included, and activate the space before returning them to the sculpture.

• Wk. 1 (7 – 14 Feb) Completion Without Presence
• Wk. 2 (15-21 Feb) The Build
• Wk. 3 ( 22- 28 Feb) Ground Conditions
• Wk. 4 (1 – 7 Mar) Erasure and Clearance
• Wk. 5 (8 – 13 Mar) Decisions become actions
• Wk. 6 (14 -23 Mar) Designed Future

Building-and-Construction-Terrains-SCHEDULE.pdf(PDF, 157KB)

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Artist Talks - Saturday 14 March 2pm

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Join Alan Cook for an afternoon discussion  and demonstration of his current experimental processes. Alan will be joining exhibiting artist Callum Docherty for artist talks and gallery tours of their respective exhibitions.

Image: Building and Construction Terrains [matrix], 2024, blackwood, oak, stainless steel, 55.5 x 15 x 10 cm. Image courtesy artist.

About Alan 

Alan Cook is an analytical, reflective, and experimental artist whose practice interlaces sound, sculpture, and place. His current work investigates the unintended acoustic byproducts of human activity emerging from machinery and explores how these sounds reveal our relationship with the landscape. Through processes that blend field recording, mathematical sonification, and electro-acoustic composition, Cook creates abstract soundscapes and sculptural forms that explore the boundaries between human intention, environmental systems, and technological expression.

Head shot courtesy artist.

 

When

Location

Sauerbier House, Sauerbier House, Port Noarlunga, 5167, View Map