Emah Fox is a Green Room Award nominated sound designer and composer based in Melbourne, Australia.
Her practice ranges from solo work spanning multimedia sculpture, moving image, soundscape installation and fine art photography, to collaborative work including sound design, composition and workshops with choreographers, filmmakers and other artists. She is also an electronic pop musician, vocalist, producer, actor and writer, and runs regular Synthesizer workshops (with a focus on workshops for women and non binary people) at Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio.
Please see below for details of current / recent work, and contact via form or email (Contact link in menu).
Lady Example
“Women of the world, take over, because if you don’t the world will come to an end and we haven’t got long.”
Premiering at Substation in May 2018, a Slown Smallened & Son production supported by Arts Victoria, The Besen Family Foundation, The Substation and Vitalstatisix.
LADY EXAMPLE will begin as a literal and detailed examination of the women who surround us – in our lives, in our city, in our history, in our mythology, in our popular culture. We study these women in forensic detail, analysing and inhabiting their carriage, aura, speech and interactions with socialised space, exploring hidden vulnerabilities and hierarchical power structures at play behind their often two-dimensional legacies. In the studio, our source material will evolve into an original performance aesthetic, proposing a multiplicitous, complex way of being ‘lady’; a ‘total woman’ – who will be able to guide us all forward.
Howl
2016 Green Room Award for Best Design in Contemporary + Experimental Performance
Presented by Aphids, in association with Arts House, for Festival Of Live Art 2016
Do those who object to contemporary art prefer community parades?
Howl is a celebration of 15 significant moments in art history. A ritual procession starring a sculpture of Captain Cook, thousands of sunflower seeds and a killer whale named Tilikum. A requiem that is unquestionably queer, arguably dangerous and probably obscene. Performed by three women. Scored by Mozart himself.
Created by Willoh S. Weiland, Lara Thoms and Lz Dunn, Howl commemorates controversy – from the furore aroused over a feminist self-portrait and the outrage at a rainbow being burnt repeatedly in a public square, to the indignation of artists arrested on suspicion of bio-terrorism. Howl energetically probes the reactions art can invoke, and the perspective that history permits.
Found
“The assault on the senses destabilises familiarity and renders the viewer vulnerable to the uncertainty of space and time.”
Solo Exhibition (Multimedia: sound, light, sculpture, video, print) presented by Tinning Street Gallery August 2015
An exploration of the uncertain environment through light, sound, and sculpture. Patterns found within chaos, creating synthetic skin and shelter. Through a series of multimedia installation works, Found examines the space between the synthetic and organic, the material and immaterial, the corporeal and non-corporeal, the porous and the impermeable, the sheathed and the vulnerable. Themes of disconnectedness, vulnerability to the environment, and lack of foundation are played against the way overwhelming sensorial experience is processed into order through perception of pattern, repetition, comfort.
Fallen O'er
Nominated for an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance
Presented by Slown Smallened & Son as part of Alchemy at Abbotsford Convent 2016
FALLEN O’ER was a site-responsive commission for the Abbotsford Convent’s Alchemy program. This work had a strong focus on humour, inventive writing, and site- and context-responsive making.
Score available here
This Is What's Happening
Melbourne Fringe Festival Best Dance Award
Nominated for a Green Room Award for Best Sound Design (Emah Fox)
Nominated for an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance
“Detail detail detail. It’s the detail which fascinates.”
Presented by Speakeasy, a Slown Smallened & Son production for Melbourne Fringe Festival 2015
Program notes on the premiere season: This is What’s Happening’ could be a banal filler statement from a Team Leader talking too much at a Team Meeting, or it could be the solemn, sharp-eyed certainty of a climate scientist’s findings. Likewise, our ‘company name’ Slown, Smallened & Son slides between contrasting qualities and implications: on the page the configuration of letters seems familiar, but speak the words aloud and you run into trouble. This quality of multiplicity and instability is a good fit for performance and choreography in particular, and it is closer to what being alive right now feels like to us, more than any prevailing system of beliefs or practices. We worked for quite some time on this show, and the process has been a necessarily patient one of following the work as it presents itself to us – in increments, usually, and frequently with whole chunks slipping away after first seeming so concrete. It’s a work that we have had to meet on its own terms.
Other...
2017
Artist Statement
Commission for International Computer Music Conference 2017, Shanghai
Producer / Performer, Synth Salon
Commission for 'Self Made' series, Melbourne Music Week
2016-17
Facilitator / Developer, Synthesiser workshops
Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, Artplay / Melbourne Music Week
2016
Panellist, Gender Diversity in Experimental Practice
LISTEN Conference: Feminist Futures
Sound Design, Arrival of the Rajah
Commission for installation work by Eva Abbinga for Next Wave Festival
2015
Video/Sound Artist in group show, ONSII: Transient Status
Coalesce ARI
Sound Design + Creator/Performer, Uncommon Places II: Promenade
Commission by Melbourne Fringe Festival
Sound Design, My Superstar
Commission for video work by Diego Rodriguez for MARS Gallery
Sound Design/Score, Artists Navigate 37°48'S
Commission for video work by Amy Tsilemanis for Artists Navigate
2014
Sound Design, Too Much Sun
Commission for dance work by Caroline Meaden
Sound Design / Workshop facilitator, Nocturnal
Workshop series + Public Installation at Birrarung Marr for Light In Winter Festival)