Opus No.1
Caves Gallery / Spring 1883, 2023
Catalogue essay by Amelia Wallin

Opus No. 1 is a large beading made of bright sterling silver-plated glass seed beads. It takes its title from a song written by Tim Carleton, composed when he was 16 and later adopted as hold music by a range of institutions, including Centrelink. I transcribed the song into a visual code and wove it into the grid of the beading.

In this work, I consider hold music as an institutional language: a tool that sustains delay while holding the individual in place. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889), I reflect on the relationship between clock time and lived time. Bergson describes clock time as a way of unitising locomotion: measuring how long it takes the earth to travel around the sun and then dividing that movement into months, days, hours, and minutes. An hour on the phone to Centrelink is therefore a unit of movement. Lived time falls outside this system of measurement. It is internal, emotional, and unquantifiable. Clock time and institutions both serve utility, helping to organise and control social life.

Western music notation shares similarities with bead-weaving: both move from left to right, top to bottom, and rely on rhythmic counting. In each practice, the maker or performer moves forward in sequence, without the freedom to skip ahead or return, as the work unfolds. By contrast, when listening to music, we are often unaware of the score or timeline we are moving through. In the context of Centrelink, Opus No. 1 considers how hold music can obscure one’s experience of lived time while creating the sensation of forward movement. Without hold music, there is silence, and with it, a more open space in which lived time can be felt as impatience.

In creating my first iteration of music code, I separated rhythm from pitch into distinct lines, unlike traditional Western notation, where they are merged. By translating Opus No. 1 into a visual score and embedding it into the beadwork, the institutional music of waiting becomes visible.