Continuing Bonds

Some of the oldest surviving examples of human creativity are items connected to death rituals. Despite the complexity of historical death rituals, the visceral sensations of grief are largely repressed or ignored in contemporary society – but where social ritual falters, art attempts to fill the gap. This catalogue essay was written to accompany Karike Ashworth's contemporary art exhibition, 'Lamentation', an exploration of grief, at The Hold Artspace in Brisbane.

The waves, parts 1 and 2

This two-part video installation, exploring the feminine gaze and the traditions of cinema, was exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane as part of the 2013 'Fresh Cut' program.

Silver palace

Silver palace is a multi-channel screen-based installation that explores the part that the landscape and narration play in cinematic constructions of gendered identity. The exhibition examines the ways in which our experience as a viewer of cinematic imagery can be both constructed and expanded within a gallery context.

across the sea

'Across the sea' is a multi-channel screen-based installation that explores the part that the landscape and narration play in cinematic constructions of gendered identity. The work is informed by new wave cinema, feminist film theory and emergent ideas of a female gaze. across the sea considers both the role of the artist, as well as the auteur in cinema, to question how the outcomes differ when a female rather than a male gaze is writing, directing and filming the imagery. The screen-based installation of 'across the sea' seeks to further examine the ways in which our experience as a viewer of cinematic imagery can be both constructed and expanded within a gallery context. across the sea investigates the spaces that exist between the gallery and the cinema, in an effort to consider notions of femininity that exist between and throughout the varied spaces of film and art.

Inner voices

Video works,paintings and photographic collages installed as part of an international group exhibition in Japan. The exhibition dealt with how women born after 1960 negotiated ideas of globalisation, feminism and identity and was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue.

Aggregate Icons/Combat Drag

A series of large-scale photographic collages and videoworks installed in the 2010 The Beauty Of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, Sydney Biennale Cockatoo Island, Sydney (cat.)The work addresses her ongoing interest in feminist strategies for negotiating individual and collective identities, equality,and social activism.

The declaration of resemblance and fluid insurgents

A large scale installation over three gallery spaces that addresses Wymans ongoing in exploring feminist strategies for negotiating individual and collective identities, equality, and social activism.

Combat drag

A single channel video work that explores the idea that the clothed body is often the first point of protest and demonstrates how masks and disguses provide collective power and protection in conflict zones. With catalogue.

New Dawn (Parts I & II)

New Dawn is a cross-media visual art project that comprises a multi–channel video work (Boxcopy ARI, Brisbane) and a series of sculptural works (MetroArts, Brisbane) both of which conflate the online spectacle of real events with virtual gaming. The purpose of this project is to question this new phenomenon and what are the political, social and economic repercussions for these new technological developments on our bodies and subjectivities. By doing this my work asks us to reflect on how we function as a society in response to these new spaces of interaction, how we might respond to the political dimensions of these expanded sites of inhabitation, and how they might also represent a more troubling scenario for the possibility of dissent or opposition in our media saturated culture. The work was shown at multiple venues simultaneously. One of the components of the work won the 2013 Sunshine Coast Art Prize for sculpture.

Photography & Fictions: Locating Dynamics of Practice

What happens to photographic truth when it is thwarted, subverted, stretched and even outwitted? The photography presented in this book provides a range of responses and practices- from the blatant to the exquisitely subtle- and all in the name of fiction. With full-colour images, Photography & Fiction: locating dynamics of practice illustrates and explains the latest issues and ingenious creativity involved in making pictures. The book is the consequence of a significant gathering of photographers, curators, and academics during the 5th Queensland Festival of Photography. Its themes include Fiction-as-Truth, deceptive photography, technology’s fictive potential, as well as the highly personal and inner worlds of human experience.

Shifting intimacies

Our world is literally and figuratively turning to ‘dust’. This work acknowledges decay and renewal and the transitional, cyclical natures of interrelated ecologies. It also suggests advanced levels of degradation potentially beyond reparation. Dust exists both on and beneath the border of our unaided vision. Dust particles are predominantly forms of disintegrating solids that often become the substance or catalyst of future forms. Like many tiny forms, dust is an often unnoticed residue with ‘planet-size consequences’. (Hanna Holmes 2001) The image depicts an ethereal, backlit body, continually circling and morphing, apparently floating, suggesting endless cycles of birth, life and death and inviting differing states of meditation, exploration, stillness and play. This never ending video work is taken from a large-scale interactive/media artwork created during a six-month research residency in England at the Institute of Contemporary Art London and at Vincent Dance Theatre Sheffield in 2006. It was originally presented on a raised floor screen made of pure white sand at the ICA in London (see). The project involved developing new interaction, engagement and image making strategies for media arts practice, drawing on the application of both kinetic and proprioceptive dance/performance knowledges. The work was further informed by ecological network theory that assesses the systemic implications of private and public actions within bounded systems. The creative methodology was primarily practice-led which fomented the particular qualities of imagery, generated through cross-fertilising embodied knowledge of Dance and Media Arts. This was achieved through extensive workshopping undertaken in theatres, working ‘on the floor’ live, with dancers, props, sound and projection. And eventually of course, all this dust must settle. (Holmes 2001, from Dust Jacket) Holmes, H. 2001, The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things, p.3

Representing places never visited: Landscape and the diasporic imagination

While landscape photography’s complicity with the colonial possession of new territory has been substantially discussed and well understood, this paper considers the role of the European landscape as the focus of diasporic desire. The interdisciplinary project, S2Q/Good Blood began as a social history map of Scandinavian and Nordic migration to Queensland in the nineteenth century, incorporating archival material from local collections with visual field trip data gathered in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. In 2011, some of this material found its way into the installation work, 'my mother is water, my father is wood'. What emerged from this experiment was an imaginary landscape, melding its loci through original photography and video footage in tandem with stock imagery and historical material. This juxtaposition reinforced the represented landscape as a narrative landscape and evidence of the performativity of belonging. This practitioner reflection utilizes Lynette Russell’s research into landscape archaeology to consider the significance of relationships with landscapes that are “not always empirically demonstrable.”

Yellow Peril

This catalogue essay was written to accompany Eugenia Lim's 2015 exhibition at Metro Arts, Brisbane, 'Yellow Peril'. It discusses Lim's exploration of her identity as a Chinese-Australian, providing contextual information of Chinese immigration during Australia's gold rush years and the work of Hong Kong born American artist, Tseng Kwong Chi. It presents Yellow Peril as an exhibition that speaks critically about art and our cultural history amidst a fine layering of imagery, object and context, with a vitality that is derived from its rich and compelling base in real life moments and connections.

Running Men

In this multi-screen installation, iconic male characters from Hollywood films are reconfigured to create infinitely looping scenes of running; trapping the characters in a kind of Nietchzen eternal recurrence. Stemming primarily from my investigation into anxiety as a shared social experience, the carefully edited, looped, and rotoscoped characters become avatars or surrogates for myself, and for the viewer. Through this editing, they are caught in a space of relentless confusion and paranoia – they run with, and from, anxiety. They are never caught by any unseen pursuers, but are equally unable to catch up to any unseen goal. These figures act as models of masculinity, they are objects of identification and emulation. Simultaneously, as celebrities, they are also fictions of the media sphere, both real and ethereal, they are impossible to grasp. In this duality, the work also references cinema’s tangled conflation of character and celebrity identity. It examines the subjective and intersubjective engagements we can have with popular culture, and the way that these engagements can as strategies to ‘make sense’ of social experiences. The work was exhibited in the Carriageworks space of ‘You Imagine What You Desire’, the 19th Biennale of Sydney.

Zarathustra’s Cave

In 'Zarathustra’s Cave' the iconic apartment set from 90’s sitcom 'Seinfeld' is presented devoid of actors or action of any kind. Instead the ‘apartment’ sits empty, accompanied by the ambient noise of the screen-space and the distant sound of city traffic. At irregular intervals this relative silence is punctuated by the laughter of an off-screen audience. Unprompted by any on-screen action, this spontaneous audience response ranges from raucous fits of cheering and applause to singular guffaws and giggles. The work is the product of a deep engagement with its subject matter, the result of countless hours of re-watching and editing to isolate the aural and visual spaces presented on the screen. In its resolute emptiness, the installation addresses the notion of narrative expectation. It creates a ‘nothing-space’, where a viewer can experientially oscillate between a sense of presence and absence, tension and pathos, or even between humour and existential crisis. The work was first exhibited in ‘NEW14’, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.