| This was the first in the Call Signs series of exhibitions. It was designed for a small project space, Studio 12, in the 200 Gertrude St Galleries. In 2001 I recieved an Australia Council grant to work with two mentors, Rosemary Shepherd, a lace researcher at the Powerhouse Museum and Jon Drummond a composer, both in Sydney. At the same time I was also granted a studio in the Gertrude St studios complex and soon after, was offered this exhibition. The purpose of the grant was to develop an experiment I had been persuing informally with these mentors for a year or so, improvising electronic circuits using found materials and domestic techniques for support.
The rationale behind the idea was to do with improvisation and communication and the way that these develop into cultural artefacts. I was looking, for example, at the use of textiles to record family geneology, such as the tartan in Scotland and the tatoo in the Pacific; quilt patterns in the American South were also used, in a subversive way before the Civil War, to show escaped slaves safe routes to the North.
I was also interested in the design of modern communication systems, such as the radio. Enclosing the system in a box has obvious advantages. However, now, home entertainment systems are becoming larger and increasingly built into the fabric of the home. By the same token, had electronics been adopted by its contemporaries in the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1920's, it could conceivably have developed as a kind of wallpaper rather than an object.
The exhibition used eight units composed of a Morse code indictor, emmitting the familiar beep and an oscillator which determined the speed of the sounds. No message was encoded but because these circuits were out of sinc, they gave the impression of irregular patterns and therefore of a conversation in train.
Because of its association with ships at sea, Morse code inevitably arouses feelings of the fragility of communication and human connection. | 
