amby downs - kinjarling studies: soundtracks (five years on) (2025)

As Amby Downs, artist Tahlia Palmer has cultivated an acoustic language that interrogates history, identity and perception. It’s an approach that seeks to undo the often singular reading of time and place, and as a result to open up the possibilities for investigation and questioning. Her work maintains a restlessness that reflected her intense and unwavering desire to travel deeply within the sound worlds she crafts.

Born in Boorloo/Perth and based in Naarm/Melbourne, she is descended from a Yuwaalaraay paternal line, survivors of dispossession and forced assimilation, and a Dutch maternal line, survivors of World War 2. This unique confluence of familial experience has granted her a specific perspective. This position has driven a great deal of her work within which she increasingly confronts the conditions that create and perpetuate intergenerational trauma, and through those confrontations seeks pathways for healing.

Kinjarling Studies : Soundtracks is one of the earliest works Palmer completed as Amby Downs. Initially presented in situ with a series of films at the Vancouver Arts Centre, the soundtracks were subsequently assembled into this edition. Working with field recordings as the raw materials for these pieces, she warps their sense of dimension, exploring various processes that reveal ‘another’ way of approach these materials. She casts light on the ‘underheard’ and even the hidden, asking us to lean into and even embrace these often uneasy sound environments.

This is a record of deep verticality. Each piece pulls us further into the sound world of Amby Downs, and in that zone she reveals to us new ways of recognising and recontextualising the familiarity of the everyday. It’s not always an easy journey, but as a we come back out of that place she shows us, the character of world around us remains changed forever.