Aural Transferences – Chelle Destefano

See Chelle Destefano's Aural transferences at the Art Gallery of Ballarat's Backspace Gallery

For Creswick artist Chelle Destefano, sound is not just a landscape for hearing. Through time, space and memory, the deaf artist visually represents her experience of sound before she lost her hearing completely at age nine.

The set of drawings titled Aural transferences express the artist's personal perspective. The black and dark-coloured backgrounds are chosen for being like a veil obscuring the sound, not knowing what the sounds are. The multicoloured keys were inspired by a photograph taken of a rainbow against a dark, stormy sky, which then became the visual device for transferring her memories onto paper.