Kenneth Lambert
Born: South Africa
Lives and Works: Sydney, NSW
Artist Statement
Without a Trace, 2024
Live art performance, Dharawal Country, Berry School of Arts OpenField Arts Festival, 2025.
Black sand on painted MDF panels, robotic erasures, contact microphones, motion sensors, custom software, PVC tubes, industrial brooms, PA system. Performance duration: 45–60 minutes
Originally commissioned by Inner West Council for Edge x Biennale of Sydney, 2024
Without a Trace explores sound, material, and automated technologies as a means to examine cultural memory, identity, and the instability of human creativity in a digital age. Structured in three acts; Creation, Erasure, and Co-creation, the performance uses black sand across white panels to generate a responsive soundscape, with gestures captured and amplified through contact microphones. Robotic erasures then remove these marks, exposing the fragile relationship between permanence and disappearance.
As human and machine interventions converge, the work intensifies audience engagement and transforms observation into participation. For the artist, the work exposes the tension between inherited memory and the volatility of emerging technologies, reaffirming the artist’s role as both witness and interpreter of cultural memory.
About the Artist
Kenneth Lambert is a contemporary artist born in Cape Town, South Africa who migrated to Australia at age 10, settling in the western suburbs of Sydney. With a background in museums, design, and filmmaking, his conceptually driven practice resides at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and technology. He frequently employs data and scientific methods to generate works across multiple disciplines, including physical and digital works, progressively realised as performative and installation works.
‘Without a Trace’ can be seen in the Berry School of Arts at 10am Saturday and Sunday.
Kenneth will also be part of our Artist Panel at 2pm on Saturday 14 June in the Berry School of Arts. Tickets: $10. More info and tickets here.
