Please join us for a Saturday symphony of music and fabric work
Portland-born and Brisbane-based artist Unregistered Master Builder (Joseph E Burgess) works at the nexus of textiles, sound and kinetic art. Through carpet-based performance and custom instrument building, his practice connects the latent political and technological dimensions of textile creation, extracting, highlighting and repurposing the excessive forces and forms embedded in the act of making. Drawing on archival materials and the heritage of technology, his work provokes an ongoing interplay between media, mediums and technical process.
In 2026 Joseph published The Carpet Maker’s Hafted Tool: A Hackable Instrument for Sonoric Textile Practice in the proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2026.
Central to Joseph’s carpet-making practice is the concept of
sonotextility¹, which describes the gestalt co-emergence of sound and textile practices in human cultural and cognitive development. Rooted in Material Engagement Theory, sonotextility foregrounds the shared material logics of music and textile: tension, rhythm, repetition, patterning, and the embodied manipulation of flexible media.
Through these material interactions, the body of physical work reflects the monumentality and ubiquity of textiles in technology and language, reaffirming the communicative capacity of textiles² and the relevance of textile practice under the ever-looming presence of intangible and immaterial notions of technology in contemporary media.
Date: Saturday 10 October, 11:30am - 12:30pm
Location: Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, 166 Old Maryborough Road, Pialba
Cost: Free
Image: Marty Pouwelse