Mel O’Callaghan: Pulse of the Planet

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Mel O’Callaghan, "First Sound, Last Sound" (performance), 2022

Installation view, "All is Life," 2022, Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia. (photo by Zan Wimberley)

Pulse of the Planet is a major solo exhibition by Paris/Sydney-based artist Mel O’Callaghan that synthesizes several years of collaborations and ways of knowing. For the last twenty years of her practice, O’Callaghan has explored resonant objects, spaces, and tools—namely how they affect, codify, and connect bodies. By working alongside experts in other fields, O’Callaghan seeks to pose new questions through her artistic practice, to highlight the natural synergies between disciplines, as well as to focus attention on how highly curious researchers reciprocally approach complex questions about our more-than-human existence.

The works in this exhibition convene transdisciplinary creative research—from oceanographers, physicists, microbial ecologists, psychologists, and musicologists, among others—that converges around the most urgent problems of our time, including planetary shifts, the viral age, climate futures, interspecies living, and which lifeworlds we must be attentive to and why. Drawing on our innate impulse to connect with one another and to Earth’s inexplicable forces, Pulse of the Planet sees all bodies—human and non-human—as sites of revelation and connection.

The exhibition brings together a chorus of works that begin at the planet’s very depths; at a site from which all life is said to have emerged kilometres below the surface of the ocean. O’Callaghan’s collaborators recently made a hydrophone recording at the Axial Central Caldera, East Pacific Rise—a site on the floor of the Pacific Ocean at the boundary of diverging tectonic plates—which captured vibrations beneath the planet’s surface, a phenomenon often referred to as the Earth’s heartbeat. Previously, these vibrations were emitted at a constant low frequency of 7.83 hertz, but in recent years scientists have witnessed an increase to 8 hertz. This acceleration reinforces the complex planetary changes that are currently afoot. We might understand this shifting, pulsing vibration as a bodily connection with all life, both on a microbial and an immensely geologic scale, that underscores a universal resonance that transgresses global borders.

Films presented here chart the minute and the planetary, and our own fallibility and survival in this shifting system. These works give tone and form to sites as far afield as the Termite Fields near Orrtipa Thurra (Bonya), Eastern Arrente Country; the cliffs of Baie de Singes, Calanques; and the quicksand tidal island of Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy. The frames of these films pan across and below landscapes and surfaces, submerging the viewer to both a termite-eye-view, and across great distances. O’Callaghan also contributes a series of new paintings, poured and rendered on-site to the hertz of the tuning forks; the colours of each painting chosen to optically resonate in the space.

At the centre of the exhibition is a durational performance featuring two large-scale tuning forks installed on a resonant chamber. When played, the tuning forks emit a fundamental note that creates a sympathetic call and response, which on a cellular level is in solidarity with the heartbeat of the Earth. During a series of performances performers and audience members become conduits for sympathetic sound and are called into awareness of their own somatic rhythms—such as a calm nervous system, including pulse, breath, and movement—and to consider the notion, championed in many of the planet’s knowledge systems, that the Earth, too, is a living organism.