From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Red Heels—A Hunter Valley Elegy
This article concerns an audio-locative artwork. For other musical and sound-based adaptations, see Music and Beach Surgery.
A durational audio artwork and psychogeographic walking piece tracing Katita's red kitten heels across the Hunter Valley landscape. The work fuses recorded voice (soprano, unnamed) singing fragmented lines about red pigment, leather, seamstress labour, and loss with a GPS-mapped route connecting historical textile mills, coal towns, and sites of contemporary erasure.
The premise: Katita's heels are not ornament but labour-trace—they mark the women (seamstresses, nurses, cleaners) erased from the valley's industrial genealogy. Each heel-strike syncs to audio, creating doubled rhythm: walker's pace and recorded breath.
The red motif interrogates natural dyes (madder, cochineal, aniline) native to or processed through the region, exposing the hidden female labour of their extraction and fixing. The final sequence records footsteps on gravel, silence, and a single sustained tone—the spine's resonance pitched to the frequency Katita theorizes as the earth's braking cry when its rotation reverses.
References C. W. Smith's "Landscape Within Landscape" essay and Newcastle sections of Antinomicity. Some listeners report faint transmission noise in the background mix, source unattributed. [citation needed]