Caspar Connolly: Eaves
28 February - 1 March 2026
Cache
After the recent passing of the French minimalist composer Éliane Radigue, I came across an image of her in circulation. Taken in Nice in the late 1950s, Radigue is photographed holding a spikey conch shell to her ear. In a 2011 Frieze interview with the Australian sound artist Paul Schütze, the composer describes her sound and art as being spaces, ‘conch shells in which the audience [is] placed – as if they are inside the body of an instrument’. While contemporary sound art often involves the all-encompassing effect of submersion, as in the work of Marco Fusinato, Ryoji Ikeda or Holly Herndon, Caspar Connolly’s exhibition Eaves at Cache uses the conch to subtly attune the viewer, inviting them to lean in and seek out the sound.
Caspar Connolly (b. 1991) is a Naarm / Melbourne-based sculptor and repurposer. He is a gleaner as much as he is a fabricator. In the last few years, Connolly’s practice has been rooted in the forms that construct our world and the debris of their industrialisation. While thinking about sweeping the streets, I was with a friend who was reflecting upon 2021 as ‘the year he paid attention to the ground’—I thought that was kind of poetic. In a similar sentiment, Connolly has an eye for the detritus found on sidewalks or in graveyards, and it finds its way to his studio where it is cast, replicated and studied. At Cache, artist-curator Tommaso Nervenga-Reed prompted Connolly to take a new direction, and subsequently the work exhibited in Eaves is a stylistic divergence for the artist. Until this show, I hadn’t noticed how Nervenga-Reed’s curation has encouraged several artists to move beyond their established practices.
In 2024, Connolly was hydro-dipping tree trunks and sand casting studio-made leaves with embossed digital runes, he explored new techniques that blended print and sculpture. These works were exhibited in multiple galleries around Naarm / Melbourne and made their way to the Yale-Columbia Refractor ruin in Canberra, sometimes known as Al Fresco, an outdoor gallery curated by Oscar Capezio. In 2025, Connolly used a trunk, in a larger and purer form, laying flat on the floor of the Abbotsford gallery Cafe. Now, for Eaves, Connolly takes his practice of collecting and studio manufacturing, bringing them both into the space of sound.
There are two works in the gallery, hung on the caged bookshelves on opposing walls on the left and right of Cache’s entrance. Both works feature a conch shell embedded at the centre of an XPF foam carrier. Historically, the shell of the conch has been mythologised as a vessel for transmission. Formed slowly as the creature’s mantle extracts calcium carbonate from seawater, the spiralled shell accumulates over time to form a natural architecture of resonance. In literature, as in William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, when blown the conch symbolises democracy and order. Whereas in Hindu tradition, the Shankha, associated with Lord Vishnu, signifies purity and protection.
At Cache, the shell is both the listener and the speaker. Lips and ears. Connolly leaves the shell untouched and instead uses its surroundings to urge the viewer closer. Barbed and electrical wires trace trenches around the shells, looping through the foam cushioning. Their termite-spiralling erodes the foam, creating a tunnel system that uncovers the circuitry connecting a magnetised MP3 player to a headphone bud inside the shell. Similar coils are seen on the natural erosions on the face of each shell, formed by marine polychaete worms. Leaning my head towards Eave (3), I am almost touching the shell and its foam surrounds. I smell enamel and I close my eyes to find the sound that is seeping out of the shell’s opening.
Earlier, when I was walking up the stairs to Cache, I heard two people talking and instinctively paused before the door. I recognised Nervenga-Reed’s voice, but the other voice was not familiar. So, I stood there listening, eavesdropping on their conversation, hoping to extract something secretive about the show. The same sensation occurred when I tilted my head into the conch shell, my curiosity took over and I was focused on listening in.
The whooshing sound synonymous with listening to a shell meets my ears first, the world around me translated into a fuzzy humming. Unlike previous shows, Cache’s windows were opened to let in the city’s noise pollution, which filtered through the shell and into me, resulting in a small, windy tunnel. A faint voice is hissing from inside the shell, the pace is fast and the tone is varied. The ramblings overlap and repeat erratically, they shift between stories and timelines. The audio is unedited re-recordings of conversations Connolly has overheard on transport. When read out loud again by a hired voice actor, the results dip in and out of scenes around the city. We’re eavesdropping the eavesdropper and in turn unwillingly become a part of the anonymity.
Architecture, technology and eavesdropping are intrinsically linked, from the etymology of the term eavesdropping to the logistics of overhearing. Eavesdropping as a notion reintroduces the malice of surveillance states, now ever-evolving. These themes have been explored by Joel Stern, James Parker and Sean Dockery, who, under the name Machine Listening, collaborated to produce a series of exhibitions, talks and publications. In the introduction to their reader Eavesdropping (2019), Stern, Parker and Dockery bring forward an etching from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis from 1650. The musical encyclopaedia imagines a large shell shaped funnel fitted through a thick wall, to amplify the sounds of a building’s courtyard into the surrounding domicile rooms. Parker and Stern compare the speculative device in Kircher’s print to an aural version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Read alongside Cache, the conch becomes less a symbol than a mechanism: an architectural ear that folds the city inward.
Both Eave (1) and (3) are presented with tailored foam that cradles the delicate shells and has been carved to fit all the elements of the work (the foam, of course, has been repurposed from past exhibitions). Normally, we are not meant to take too much notice of how exhibition fittings, like picture frames or clear plinth boxes, seal the art in its place. In Farewell to an Idea (1999), TJ Clark remarks on a notebook sketch by Adolf Menzel titled Moltke’s Binoculars (1871). The drawing depicts the binoculars, but also more importantly multiple perspectives of their leather case. Clark focuses on the case as a symbol of the late nineteenth century, stating pointedly that ‘it is as if an object did not properly exist for this culture until it sat tight in its own interior’. The acceleration in the production of consumer goods came with a corresponding proliferation of cases, pockets, bags, and padding; ‘a separate small world should be provided for it, like a shell or calyx.’ In faded lavender enamel coatings, Connolly’s shells are packed into shells of their own. Eave (3) on the right wall takes it tailoring seriously by comfortably presenting circular borders around the shell and wires. While the foam around Eave (1) takes the abnormal shape of two frozen clockhands pointing to either 9.15 or 3.45 o’clock. At their centre is the auricular device, flashing a blue light, acting as a ticking power source.
Currently in Naarm / Melbourne there has been a flare up of painting exhibitions. To name a few, Jeb Costin and Ignatz Cady Freer’s duo show at the newly opened Netherlands, the ex-Guzzler Pollock-style paintings at 35 McIlwraith Place and Caesar Florence-Howard’s show at Conners Conners. Moreover, Strawberry and Peepshow combined their closely located galleries to present Melbourne Painting Exhibition which displayed 31 painters as a sort of anti-Melbourne Art Fairshow. While these shows warrant their own discussions, praise, and critique, for me it is more compelling to see an artist like Connolly reject the thinning and thickening of trends and instead focus purely on material study. Connolly’s practice, as I understand it, breaks the object down to its innards, opens up the material, and dissects its foundations to reconsider the status of sculpture itself.