PRACTICE & APPROACH

Working with what exceeds human sense

Our work begins in recognising that the world is always speaking — through grain, pigment, lichen, sound, absence, and atmospheric shift. We follow movements that sit just beyond perception: weather passing through a body, resonance in a piece of timber, spectral colours held in plant chemistries, the feeling of something sensed before it becomes nameable.

We work with materials and signals that carry memory:

    •    wind-fallen plants, lichen pigments, haustoria

    •    timber shaped by climate, species entanglement, and deep time

    •    sound resonances and ecological rhythms

    •    spectral data, film, and layered drawings

    •    sculptural forms that emerge through dialogue with place

Our work is not about imposing form, but moving with the intelligence of materials — allowing them to shape the process, and attending to the mismatched timescales, absences, and translation losses that arise along the way.

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WAYS OF MAKING

Ross’s practice

Ross works primarily with wood as a living ecological record. His sculptural furniture, sound works, and installations emerge from long-standing inquiry into forests, material intelligence, and the sensory relationships between humans and place. From sonic sculptures and listening devices to sculptural furniture and environmental sound instruments, his work explores how materials hold story, pattern, form, and the subtle atmospheres of the landscapes that shape them.

Karla’s practice

Karla works with the strangeness of a world that exceeds human sense, listening for what is felt before it can be named. Her practice draws from embodied pattern-recognition formed in childhood, shaped by hyper-attention, rupture, and learning to read atmospheres. She works through film, sound, drawing, textiles, spectral imaging, and plant and lichen chemistries, following shifts between inner weather and the weather of place. Her materials carry deep timescales and their own ways of knowing, moving through her processes with a sort of agency she collaborates with rather than directs.

Together

Our studio is a site of cross-pollination: shared research, shared conversations, shared weather, shared place. The work grows in the turbulence and quiet between our practices, influenced by both body-tempo and landscape-tempo.

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PLACE

Wadawurrung Country

We live and work on Wadawurrung Country, in a landscape of volcanic stone, wind-shaped forests, and shifting weather patterns. Relocating here from Kabi Kabi Country in 2024, we continue to learn how to be here — listening and attending to the long relationships between land, time, beings, and story.

Place is not backdrop. It is collaborator, teacher, and boundary-setter.

Everything we make belongs to the places that make us.

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STUDIO ENVIRONMENT

Moonlite Studios includes:

    •    a woodworking and sculpture workshop

    •    a material lab for plant-based and lichen-based processes

    •    a sound and film space for spectral imaging and field recordings

    •    outdoor making shaped by season, light, wind, and site

    •    shared research and writing areas for conceptual, ecological, and philosophical threads

The studio’s pace is adaptive — shaped by disability, weather, material tempos, and the shifting intensities of the work. It grows through slow attention, seasonal change, rest, recurrence, and the cycles embedded in the materials themselves.

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WHAT WE’RE EXPLORING

    •    material intelligence and ecological dialogue

    •    sound as a way of sensing place

    •    patterns of rupture, repair, and recomposition

    •    weather systems operating through bodies

    •    deep time embedded in natural materials

    •    absence, translation loss, and the strangeness of perception

    •    ethics of working with land, species, and disturbance

    •    forms shaped by listening rather than direction

    •    meeting points between craft, science, philosophy, and embodied knowledge

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A STUDIO IN ONGOING CONVERSATION

Much of what happens here emerges through the ongoing conversation between us. Our ways of sensing and thinking with place shape the work we make individually and together. The studio is porous — open to the influence of weather, plants, sleep cycles, ecological disturbance, and the stories that move through the land.

Moonlite Studios evolves with these movements, carrying our shared and individual inquiries forward.

Everything we make belongs to the systems that shape us.