Creative Australia · HIAP 2027 · Support material
Listening Portraits is Emily Morton’s emerging, consent-led practice bringing recorded life stories together with fine-line drawing. Immediate marks made during a conversation are developed through repeated listening into layered visual portraits.
Selected support material
Ten still images are presented below. Select any image to open it at full size. The sequence begins with existing fine-line work, then follows the project from its first prototype to a proposed participatory exhibition format.
Graphite and restrained colour; sensitivity developed through close observation.
Line, intimacy and relationship held through economical mark-making.
An architectural memory study connecting place, event and personal history.
A narrative portrait in which setting carries part of the remembered experience.
An existing visual practice begins to acquire an audio dimension. The drawing records the labour of attention rather than illustrating a transcript.
An early articulation of the gap between preserving how somebody looked and preserving how they sounded.
A voluntary, consent-led pathway from private voice to a selectively shared living archive.
A possible encounter where visitors may sit, listen and move between voice and visual portrait.
Testing how private acts of listening might become a careful public encounter without separating a voice from its visual response.
A future exhibition proposition connecting intimate recorded testimony, drawn interpretation and participant-controlled access.
The artistic proposition
“Photographs preserve how somebody looked. Listening portraiture asks whether art can also preserve how it felt to be with them.”
A participant records memories and reflections with clear, revisitable consent. Emily makes immediate drawings during the conversation, then returns to the voice repeatedly. Language, pauses, cadence, emotion, remembered places and recurring images become visual decisions.
The recording and drawing remain distinct but connected: one carries the person’s own voice; the other makes the artist’s attention visible. The work may remain private or be selectively shared according to the participant’s choices.
Residency research
What becomes visible when portraiture begins with voice rather than appearance?
How do immediate drawing and repeated listening produce different forms of knowledge?
How can consent remain active and revisable throughout making, storage and presentation?
How can artistic authorship and aesthetic integrity coexist with a genuinely non-extractive encounter?
Why Helsinki · Why HIAP
The proposed 16 August–14 November 2027 residency would move Listening Portraits from an intuitive first prototype toward a rigorous, ethically grounded artistic method. Studio tests will explore sound-to-line relationships, participant agency, audio presentation and the difference between immediate and repeated listening.
Helsinki is relevant for its socially engaged and participatory arts ecology. Early exchange is supported by Helsinki-based artists Katja Juhola and Tellervo Kalleinen, whose practices engage directly with conversation, invitation, collaboration and responsibility.
Scope: this is independent visual and experimental art research. It is not wedding hire, marketing activity or commercial product development.
Artist information
Interdisciplinary visual artist · portraiture, memory and recorded voice
Emily Morton is an Adelaide-based interdisciplinary visual artist working across fine-line drawing, painting, photography, recorded voice and socially engaged storytelling. Her practice investigates memory, invisible experience, emotional endurance and the traces people leave behind. Living with chronic pain shapes her attention to experiences that cannot be read from appearance alone. Listening Portraits grows from more than a decade of photographic and moving-image storytelling and from her developing camera-free approaches to voice preservation.
View or download artist CV · 2 A4 pagesEmily Jade Productions · 100+ personalised films and photographic works
University of Adelaide
European Institute of Design
Listening Portraits / Voices That Remain: Drawn from Memory
Finnish support
Both one-page letters are approved, non-binding expressions of support describing the relevance of the proposed Helsinki exchange.
Signed letter of support · Helsinki
Visual artist and curator · Founder and Artistic Director, International Socially Engaged Art Symposium (ISEAS)
Juhola identifies the project’s questions of consent, non-extraction, collaboration and aesthetic integrity as meaningful areas for artistic research, and is open to continuing dialogue in Finland.
Open one-page PDFApproved letter of support · Helsinki
Artist · participatory practice, moving image, performance and public art
Kalleinen recognises the project’s relevance to invitation, collaboration and authorship, and supports online planning dialogue and an in-person collegial exchange if Emily is selected.
Open one-page PDFMaterial register