Beyond the Talus: A ‘Stay Cool’ Collaboration
beyond the talus
withering in the valley
a hanging glacier
These three lines were inspired by a photograph I took in 2019 while visiting Uummannaq in northern Greenland. I had no idea at the time, that years later, those few words and that image would inspire musicians around the world.
The Stay Cool project
This year, the haiku and image became part of Stay Cool, an exhibition in Griffith, Australia, that brought together haiku, photography and contemporary music in a collaboration between Red Earth Ecology and the Italian record label Naviar Records.
I was invited by the curator, Jason Richardson, to be part of the project, which included a series of five writing workshops, each approaching haiku from a different angle; a call for haiku submissions from participants; a second call for musical compositions inspired by selected haiku; and, ultimately, an exhibition.
My workshop was the second in the series and introduced participants to writing haiku in the style of the Japanese masters. In particular, we focused on:
- being clear and direct
- feeling rather than thinking, and showing rather than telling
- leaving space in the poem
- the importance of seasonal and related references
- fighting for the right word
I also walked participants through my own process for creating haiku, using an example to show how I move from initial notes and observations through to a more finely crafted poem.
You can read more about the session in Jason Richardson’s writeup of the workshop.
Opening the poem to collaboration
Once the workshop series had finished, participants were invited to submit haiku they had written. This poem was selected as one of six to be shared with the Naviar Records ekphrastic community, where composers were invited to create new pieces of music in response to the poem and image.
Naviar has been running weekly haiku-based ekphrastic challenges for many years, connecting haiku with musicians who interpret them through sound. I’ve contributed several of my field recordings to similar collaborative projects through Cities and Memory, and I’ve always found it fascinating to hear the different directions composers take from the same source material.
But this was the first time I’d done it with haiku.
What would another artist hear in these three lines and this image?
What composers heard in the silence
The answer, it turned out, was almost anything.
Many of the responses were mournful or unsettled.
But a few were more upbeat, or downright disjointed!
I knew what I had been thinking about when I took the photograph and crafted the haiku, but that context belonged only to me. Once the work entered the world through this project, other artists brought their own backgrounds, knowledge, interests, and experiences to those same few words and image.
You can listen to all 20 of the different interpretations of beyond the talus on the Naviar Records page: Beyond the Talus: Naviar Haiku #636
On the gallery wall at Griffith Artspace
The exhibition at Griffith Artspace brought everything together. It featured the six selected haiku, each displayed alongside its accompanying photograph and linked via a QR code to the musical compositions it inspired. The exhibition also included more than a dozen additional haiku contributed by workshop participants.
It was a truly collaborative exhibition, bringing together writers and musicians from different parts of the world. And for me, there was something particularly satisfying about seeing this haiku and photograph on the gallery wall, knowing that they had also inspired at least 20 different composers to create their own artworks.
The exhibition ran at Griffith Regional Theatre from 25 April to 31 July 2026. You can read more about it and the wider Stay Cool project here: Stay Cool exhibition in Griffith
