Queensland arts cuts: the real story

In the first part of an exclusive 3-part series, Ben Eltham exposes the machinations and implications of money and mates in Queensland's arts sector. Article investigates the behind-the-scenes policy decisions inside the Queensland government that resulted in significant funding cuts to small-to-medium cultural organsations in Queensland in late 2013.

Writing “nhill” : the short story as still life

This chapter explores the philosophical, literary and practice-based elements that contributed to the writing by the author of a short story ('Nhill') and reflects upon how, as an example of creative-writing practice, the story contributes to Humanities-based research into issues of time, settlement, Aboriginality and post-coloniality. It works with theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva and Norman Bryson, as well as engaging with various painterly examples of Still Life. The possibility of a productive syncretism between Literature and Painting is proposed and extended.

Sensing the story: structure and improvisation in writing for performance.

This article discusses the process of writing through devising in performance. It takes as a case study Apart of and A Part From in which muscle and sense memory – touch, smell, taste, sound and sight – were the points of departure for a contemporary performance piece on migration and identity. This was a practice-as-research project aimed to better understand the artist’s body (myself) in improvisation with memory fragments. Working from a non-verbal frame the writing experience began as actions in space, then new memories in my body, to maps on paper, to key word and some staging patterns, to systematic capturing of the textual, rhythmic and spatial structures in the emerging 30-minute performance. Various objects were incorporated to give aesthetic coherence of the piece. The article reports on the processes of writing in action, the writing and performing as lived experience and how the writing emerged from the spaces in between – self and other, self and object, self and space, present self and past self.