Sriwhana Spong’s The painter-tailor

Renowned New Zealand musicians and audio-visual artists, Beth Dawson, Jade Farley and Alice Sparrow perform a twenty-minute improvisation of Sriwhana Spong’s ‘personal orchestra’, a key component of Spong’s Walters Prize exhibition, The Painter-tailor, 2019-2021.

Made over the last few years, these instruments were inspired by the Indonesian gamelan: a unique orchestra whose pitch traditionally differed from village to village in Bali.

Spong is compelled by the notion of a place and its community being represented by its own specifically tuned orchestra, each of her instruments is named after a friend or collaborator, and will be activated across the period of the exhibition.