Shot from the vantage point of a constellation of stars, Somebody is living on this beach observes humans across the history of the world as they draw and write messages to each other, to themselves, to somebody, and to anybody, from their scattered places across time and the archipelago of Earth. The figures have been filmed in solitude, believing themselves the last humans on the planet. They write to somebody who may not understand, may not respond, or may not be there at all.

The work takes leave from a short story by J.G. Ballard titled Prisoner of the Coral Deep, in which a man holds a seashell to his ear and hears “a faint human cry” belonging to a “mariner from a distant future marooned millions of years ago.” Seashells are imagined as vessels that are safekept in the primordial ocean, protecting the memories of the world. Here, wooden seashells carved by hand appear beached onto a barren shore: some have been pried open, singing memories in a language we cannot understand; others remain closed and elusive. Some are vacant, listening for stray memories as they drift by.

Sitting somewhere between the hopeful and the melancholic, Somebody is living on this beach is a work about language, mark-making, and being alone with the alone. It wonders at the existence, or inexistence, of an infinite reservoir of all the world’s memories, and conjures a chorus of humans once or not yet known.

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Tia Madden is an interdisciplinary artist based on Dharug land in the Blue Mountains. Across drawing, sculpture, moving image and installation, she ruminates on the poetics of illegibility, wondering what the unreadable can and cannot tell us about humans who make markings, and who the markings are made to reach. It is by doing so that she unsettles assumptions around how meaning is constructed, interpreted, and culturally authorised.