Noisy Eyes
Backwoods Gallery, Collingwood 15 August – 14 September 2025
Caroline Field
Curator, ACU Art Collection
August 2025
Daniel O’Toole’s exhibition Noisy Eyes presents a compelling and immersive body of work that explores the intricate relationship between sensory perception, a neurological condition and artistic expression. The paintings and accompanying soundscape form a meditation on the perceptual distortions associated with Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS), a neurological disorder characterised by visual static that resembles film grain or analogue television interference. Engaging with this through material and abstract experimentation, O’Toole invites viewers to consider how the mechanics of perception and light shape our experience of the world and how internal distortions can be externalised into sublime aesthetic form. The series comprises 45 works, of which only a selection is on display. These 13 large-scale paintings create a dramatic hang in Backwoods Gallery.
O’Toole made Noisy Eyes over an 18-month period, following a rural eco-residency at Outer Magnolia, in Birdwood, New South Wales. He describes the series as a culmination of ‘intuition, experimentation and reflection’.[1] His practice is rooted in spontaneity, with playful experimentation often driving the initial stages, followed by deep reflection. His practice has two key threads, visual and auditory. First, using a process known as ‘film soup’, he captures gradients on a digital screen using an analogue film camera. He then manipulates the 35mm film using household substances such as salt, turmeric, vinegar, green tea and other natural agents. These affect the film’s surface, creating chaotic textures and distorted images reminiscent of the visual static associated with VSS. The intervention becomes his visual reference point for approaching the canvas. This is a process O’Toole introduced in his ongoing project Cosmic Soup (2023–).
Second is through discoveries he made when composing electro-acoustic music and designing experimental sound devices. For Noisy Eyes, the unexpected source of discovery was the ‘particle plate’, a device he created during the Outer Magnolia residency. By dropping mung beans and chickpeas on to the plate he created music, and he developed an affinity for the materials and their potential to be used as a component of his painting process.
O’Toole says of these threads in his practice:
[I had this] fascination with film grain and the kind of alchemy of those slightly chaotic photographic processes, which I was chasing a little bit in painting, trying to find ways to sort of replicate the noise and life in an analogue photo, because there was always a magic in the analogue photography that I felt was missing in the paintings … I also have this sound thing ... influencing and converging on a similar path, because the paintings physically and literally came out of that sound work and having particles hanging around my studio, having chickpeas and mung beans and sand everywhere, after the residency, which were for sound. I then just thought, well, I’ve got these here. Maybe I should try making some images with these materials.
The painting process, O’Toole admits, involving energetic spray-gun techniques, is demanding both physically and emotionally; he describes as both exhausting and rewarding the physical effort of creating large-scale paintings using industrial tools and climbing ladders. Managing these canvases is a big part of the visceral nature of his practice, and these sensorially pulsating works invoke a sense of movement, vitality and immersion. These qualities reflect not only the physical act of creation but also the emotional and neurological intensity behind the work.
While spontaneity underwrites O’Toole’s practice, he balances it with precision, demonstrated vividly in his studio technique in which, for example, tiny particles are dropped with meticulous care in an immersive, meditative act. Backwoods Gallery director Byron Bowman Kehoe says:
Dan has a strategic knowledge about their outcome. He knows, by placing the particles, just how they are going to eventuate. His accuracy is almost scientific!
As an observer, you break through after spending time [with the canvases]. The effect starts to do things to your vision—altered and refracted, twinkling, visionary. It’s very ambitious in such a big space, almost stadium-like! It’s like the Rothko Chapel, easy and accessible yet overwhelming and calming at the same time.[2]
This tactile, granular effect, explored through monolithic canvases, creates a dynamic environment that challenges viewers’ perceptions. The works evoke a sense of movement and pulsation, but they are also infused with a delicate balance: intense yet fragile, vibrant yet soft. The richness of tone, the layering of hues, the shimmering fluid surfaces give an almost transcendent quality, transforming the gallery into a contemplative sanctuary that reflects the artist’s internal sensory landscape.
To expand this landscape, the exhibition includes two sound installations that viewers can engage with. The first, The Particle Drum, is a circular steel object with a Perspex front and with tines protruding on its internal surface. Carefully selected materials travel through the tines when the drum is spun, creating sound. This is captured by a microphone above the work and then reprocessed through a series of digital processors and played into the gallery as an ambient soundscape. The sonic result is a ghostly droning that is refracted and altered, echoing through the gallery.
The second is The Particle Plate, a square steel plate placed below a digital monitor, which creates sounds when a visitor drops a ping-pong ball onto its surface. Microphones below the plate capture the vibrations and process them through Ableton Live software to create sound. A monitor on the wall above the plate creates digital graphics that correspond to the activity on the plate’s surface. It is through these reverberations and the multiphonic, percussive textures that we experience the second thread of his practice, aurally reflecting the paintings’ visual noise.
It may come as no surprise to learn that O’Toole has lived with VSS since his youth. For years he has navigated the persistent interference of visual static, and this has profoundly influenced his worldview, artistic identity and creative choices. The works shown here represent this internal noise, a distortion he now externalises and seeks to communicate:
I’m creating abstract representations of a sensory experience that I live with and have had since I was 17… I wasn’t ready to really talk about it publicly in previous years. I kind of pushed it down and thought I don’t know if I want to tell everyone … maybe they’ll think I’m a bit weird. I am a bit weird, but I just don’t care anymore. You get older—I turned 41 last week—and, yeah, I think it makes a difference. I’ve learnt to live with this ... it has a significant impact on my visual experience of the world. As an artist who works visually, that’s my language. I think my subconscious drive has been to understand myself and connect with people on this level, and to show people what it is I’m living with and what I see.
O’Toole’s Noisy Eyes is testament to the transformative power of art in articulating personal and neurological experience. Reflecting Colour Field’s focus on the material qualities of surface and the immediacy of pure colour, his work demonstrates the action of colour and texture as integral, refined and sophisticated. Balancing scientific precision with experimentation, O’Toole creates instinctive, immersive, layered works that give primacy to expansive fields of colour, subtle gradations and the physicality of paint. The exhibition invites deep reflection on internal neurological landscapes and constructs a vast and encompassing canopy of creative impulse, where diffuse surfaces evoke sensory disorientation. It is a profound space that oscillates between calming serenity and overwhelming intensity.