Art on the Steps
New works by Mel O'Callaghan and Frances Barrett
Bound together by voice
10 – 11 April 2026
Two of Australia’s most distinctive contemporary artists, Mel O’Callaghan and Frances Barrett, harness the elemental force of the human voice in two new performance works commissioned by the Sydney Opera House.
Both works, free for visitors, will take place on and under the Monumental Steps across two days in April 2026. They mark the inaugural commissions of a new Opera House series, Art on the Steps, in which artists are invited to reimagine the potential of this vibrant civic space.
Mel O’Callaghan’s Live Echo, works with three hundred choristers from the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and composer Dan Walker to transform the Opera House into a resonant instrument, fusing human and architectural breath into a single vibration. Frances Barrett’s Celia gathers seven vocalists beneath the steps in an improvised exchange of calls and echoes, where sound becomes a way to hold loss and remembrance. Together, they turn the Opera House into a space of listening — where voice moves.
Read more about Contemporary Art at the Sydney Opera House.
Presented and Commissioned by the Sydney Opera House.
Thank you to our Idealist donors, Andrew Cameron AM and Cathy Cameron, for their support of this project.
Image credit: Lauren Brincat, Tutti Presto fff (2022). Presented and Commissioned by Sydney Opera House.
Explore the series
Note from the Curator
In ancient myth, women’s voices were long feared: too shrill, too emotional, too much. Their cries were said to unseat reason, to loosen order. Western civilisation learned to call their sound noise, not knowledge — a music to be contained, softened, silenced.
In these two new works, Frances Barrett and Mel O’Callaghan return to the voice as a source of power, rupture and renewal. They listen for what exists between breath and meaning, between vibration and language — the moment before sense is made, when sound is still wild, full of possibility.
Mel O’Callaghan’s Live Echo and Frances Barrett’s Celia are positioned above and below the building’s Monumental Steps — expansive, durational, vibrating with memory. One gathers the collective breath of hundreds of singers; the other channels the unreturned calls of what has vanished.
As one work exhales, the other listens back. Together, they form a call-and-response across time, body and architecture — a conversation between what can be heard and what can only be felt.
They remind us that the voice is never neutral. This is history made audible — the female voice returned to its full force, no longer noise but knowing.
Micheal Do (Former Senior Curator, Contemporary Art of the Sydney Opera House)
[Image credit: Rob Tennent]