Gabriella-Hirst

Once, when I had my ears candled, I heard all the conversations melting at once. I usually find it hard to listen. I thought I had bad hearing, but it was a waxy build up. I realise now I was wrong — you were there for me all along.

Have you ever convinced a whale to let you clean out its ears? That’s my job. My days are spent rowing around in circles, waiting for a plume or raised tail. Sometimes I dream of whale tales. I regularly wake up in sweats, thinking I’ve been swallowed whole. In reality though, the whales are always happy to see me. They gently tilt an ear canal towards the surface of the water. One eye stares up at the sky and the other is fixed on the depths of the ocean.

I use a giant earbud to tunnel in. Like growth rings on a tree trunk, the layered wax is an accumulative index of the goings on in and around the whale during its lifespan. A cortisol calendar. Stress levels peaked during the height of the whaling industry, and again during Cold War nuclear testing. Nowadays it’s noise pollution that does it. The shipping lanes are starting to look like dual carriageways. The whalers changed to container ships, the blubber to petrochemicals, the spermaceti candles to paraffin – either way the oil still burns.

Maybe their earwax is so potent because it has all the whale song stuck in it. Our will to understand their song repositioned this sea monster in our imaginations. Like with the ambergris, you can smell the wax before you see it. I rotate the bud slowly once the nutty aroma arrives, releasing more trapped and misconstrued family conversations with each spiralling motion.

One day I might burrow so deep I can make myself a home inside a whale. I hear it’s a nice and cosy place to live, but that might also be based on a misunderstanding.

Gabriella Hirst is an artist and writer whose practice spans moving image, performance, installation, and the garden as a site of critique and care. Her work explores tensions between acts of care and control, and how the surfaces of systems of power are produced and maintained. Recent projects examine the connections between plant taxonomies, landscape painting, art conservation, and nuclear history.

Recent exhibitions include Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2025); Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London (2025); UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2025); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2025); The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2024); Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022); Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2021); and CAC, Vilnius (2020). Hirst has been a resident at Delfina Art Foundation, London (2025) and the Villa Romana Testing Grounds Residency, Florence (2024). She received an MFA from Slade, London in 2018.

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