Jack Wansbrough

Meteorite Enquiries

Museum of Contemporary Art

2026

Meteorite Enquiries

Primavera 2026

Curated by Antares Wells

Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia

Meteorite Enquries (2026) is a sort-of sequel to Meteorite Inquries 1980-1995 (2023). Referncing the same archive, the earlier show circles something missing, while the later installation fills the gap with approximate substitutes. 125 rocks (59 terrestrial rocks, 41 pieces of industrial waste, 12 metal artefacts, 2 stone artefacts, 4 pieces of organic matter, 1 unknown object, 3 iron meteorites, 1 stony meteorite, 2 tektites) stand in for the meteorites and "meteorwrongs" described letters, drawings and photographs in the archive.

Photos: Jessica Maurer

The Fountain

Old Customs House

2026

The Fountain

Old Customs House

2026

The Fountain was a collaborative artwork by Jack Wansbrough, Oliver Hull, Pascale Giorgi, Kieron Broadhurst, Jessee Lee Johns and Jess Day. This artwork acts as a narrative sequel to their 2023 collaboration 'The Rock Pool', engaging with the commodification and exploitation of counter-culture utopias. It proposes a drilling into and pouring out from, a transfer of materials and energies.

Photos: Aaron Claringbold

Meteorite Inquiries

Pig Melon

2023

Meteorite Inquiries

Pig Melon

2023

Meteorite Inquires 1980-1995 is a series of drawings in solder on upholstered panels. The name comes from a lever arch file, found in a bin, containing 15 years of correspondence between the Western Australian Museum and members of the public asking ‘is this a meteorite?’ It’s an obscure archive of stones, slag and strange phenomena, diligent paperwork and disapointment.

Photos: Guy Louden

The Rock Pool

Old Customs House

2023

The Rock Pool

Kieron Broadhurst, Jess Day, Pascale Giorgi, Jessee Lee Johns, Oliver Hull, Jack Wansbrough

Old Customs House, Fremantle

2023

The Rock Pool was a large-scale recreation of a fictional commune, made collaboratively by Kieron Broadhurst, Jess Day, Pascale Giorgi, Jessee Lee Johns, Oliver Hull and Jack Wansbrough. It imagines a small portion of the ocean, separated for a time, spiraling around and around an improvised community, festering, becoming ever more specific, until eventually a wave comes that is beig enough to wash it back into the sea.

Photos: Artdoc / Dan McCabe

Review by Aimee Dodds

The Noise and Vibration Council

Audible Edge

2022

The Noise and Vibration Council

Audible Edge

performed by Jameson Feakes, Josiah Padmanabham, Gracie Smith, Alex Turner

2022

The Noise and Vibration Council was a commission for Audible Edge 2022

* * *

Josten Myburgh: The Noise and Vibration Council is a research-based pop organisation. What is research-based pop?

JW: Research-based pop is a loose set of strategies for generating songs from some kind of research, often drawing from an archive. In this case, we're using noise complaints from the 1970s and 80s in Perth to create songs about living nearby other people.

Who’s in the band and what will they be doing?

The live-band wing of the N&VB is Jameson Feakes, Josiah Padmanabham, Gracie Smith and Alex Turner. They will be using noise complaints to recreate historical sounds.

What is the motivation behind using noise complaints from the 1970s and 1980s in Perth as source material?

I was looking for sounds that make a paper trail. When local councils collect complaints they create these strange, sort-of accidental archives of sounds, feelings, and uses of space.

There’s also practical reasons for the timespan - it’s between two pieces of legislation, when governmental departments were being set up to address annoyance, and were actively encouraging complaints. It was long enough ago that documents are available through freedom of information requests and the State Records Office.

What kinds of noise were folks complaining about the most in suburban Perth back then?

Traffic, bands playing in pubs or practicing at home, house parties, radios, amplified spruikers on Hay St, speedways, church bells, animals, hoodlums.

There’s a lot of complaints about air conditioners. I get the sense that people are just starting to install them at home, and those who haven’t are complaining that they have to shut their windows in Summer because of other people’s noisy AC.

Can you share a favourite noise complaint that you uncovered in your research?

One of my favourites is a long account of someone walking around the streets of Vic Park looking for loud radios. Often the music stops before the complainant finds it, or the people playing music are happy to turn it off, and then the complainant dispassionately describes who’s there and where they're standing. There’s no punctuation and they change subject impulsively. It’s really poetic. Reading it you feel constantly disoriented and unresolved. Is that how the writer felt? I can’t tell.

Photo: Edwin Sitt

The Many Forked Tongue

Private Island

2021

The Many Forked Tongue

Alex Turner and Jack Wansbrough

Private Island

2021

The Many Forked Tongue was collaborative installation by Alex Turner and Jack Wansbrough.

It was a sort of experimental midi oral history, played through a ring of a karaoke machines on a carpeted stage. Voices spoke about about sticky carpets, flirting, body swapping, shame, etc. Midi samples from pop songs synchronised, jarringly, with the sound of people stumbling over their words.

Photos Dan McCabe

Oranging Rain Glow

Private Island

2020

Oranging Rain Glow

Oliver Hull and Jack Wansbrough

Private Island

2020

Oranging Rain Glow was the second collaborative installation by Oliver Hull and Jack Wansbrough. A nonsense sequel to our 2018 show Orbiting Rainbows. The references fell away, leaving only colours and shapes and furniture.

In the room there was a pinboard structure with TVs and lamps clamped onto it. I soldered small pewter wizards onto long wires to turn on and off touch lamps at a distance. On the screens Oliver's videos simulated the movements of leaves on a tree. The animated shapes sometimes knock into eachother, and sometimes pass right through.

Photos Dan McCabe

Leaves/Bugs/Bacteria(2020) by Oliver Hull

Wet Courage

Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Research Council

2019

Wet Courage

Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Research Council

Elina Bry, Caroline Hussey, Jack Wansbrough, Simon Weins, and Feronia Wennborg

2019

According to John Lilly, to cross the species divide we will need wet courage, 'to free up one's own mind, to see the new possibilities of feeling and thinking without the dry civilised structures', OR, as Joan McIntyre suggested 'the way to enter the mind of the whale is to enter the water.'

Wet Courage is a research-based pop album. I had some recordings of Lilly’s dolphin communication experiments and met Joel from GLARC who suggested putting out a tape. Feronia, Elina, Simon, Caroline and I formed a band of non-musicians, or musicians mostly not playing what we were practiced at. We were reading about dolphin research in the 1960s: articles written in the name of science, military development, and new age awakening. We would meet at my apartment, push around found text, and improvise songs. It felt important that everyone was singing. There were some irreconcilable ambitions at the foundation, some confusion, a lot of play. We went on, and borrowed from eachother.

Wet Courage on Bandcamp

Earth Coincidence Control Office

Felt Space

2017

Earth Coincidence Control Office

Kieron Broadhurst and Jack Wansbrough

Felt Space

2017

Earth Coincidence Control Office was a collaborative installation by Kieron Broadhurst and Jack Wansbrough. It was fictional replica of the Adelaide branch of the ECCO, a network of offices that interpreted and manufactured coincidences. At three dinky workstations, the workers would push aside piles of dolphin knick-knacks to get on with their clandestine, new age, fluxus busy work.

While we drove around Adelaide collecting bric-a-brac, Kieron talked about pulp sci-fi in a way that made art feel wide open and unprecious. We hadn’t compared notes before the opening, and spent the artist talk interrupting eachother to disagree on the basic facts. This is what the show was like.

Photos: Steph Fuller

Trouble at Times

Free Range

2016

Trouble at Times

Maria Paris and Jack Wanbsbrough

Free Range

2016

Trouble at Times was an exhibition by Maria Paris and Jack Wansbrough.

Years later, I still don’t fully understand if the Nona Hour is a tradition specific to Maria and her family, or to Bogota, (certainly it has something do with apartments and mountains). I understand that it’s a sentimental time of the day, around sun set, when people withdraw to their houses and lower the blinds– that it has something to with loneliness and separation, in a general way and also a specific way about one grandmother. Eg. a sock without a pair is a nona sock.

With a very sharp pencil, Maria made drawings tracking sunlight and shadows. I printed roller blinds that would go up and down every few minutes with some clunky home automation software. Free Range was in a shopfront space, next to the Perth Train Station. You could sit and face either Maria's quietly violent drawings or watch trains through my restless blinds.

Photos Guy Louden