Sammy Hawker | Sound-Forms: Whale Song

Next date: Saturday, 29 August 2026 | 12:00 AM

Canberra-based artist Sammy Hawker’s Sound-Forms: Whale Song brings art and science into poetic dialogue, reinterpreting whale song recordings collected in the 1990s by Mark Franklin of The Oceania Project.

Established in 1988, by Dr Trish and Dr Wally Franklin, The Oceania Project supports the conservation of whales, dolphins and the ocean environment, with a long-term focus on the behaviour and ecology of humpback whales in Hervey Bay.

Cymatics (from Ancient Greek κῦμα meaning wave) is the study of making sound visible. For this exhibition Sammy Hawker worked with designer Sam Tomkins to develop an analogue ‘cymatic instrument’, giving form to these songs as they vibrate through water.

Hawker has documented these projected songs to create a hypnotic series of individual cymatic figures which conjure the mysterious and complex voices of our multispecies world.

Launching Saturday 29 August, coinciding with the Hervey Bay Whale Festival 2026.

Sound-Forms: Whale Song is an iteration of the exhibition Worlds Around Us, presented at Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Centre in 2025. Worlds Around Us was an outcome of the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio program supported by benefactor Mr Tim Fairfax AC.

^{Image: Sammy Hawker, Cymatic Figure from Humpback Whale Song (Pleiades #1), 2025.}

 

When

Location

Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, 166 Old Maryborough Road, Pialba, 4655, View Map