This audiovisual work was created during an online residency with the Walking Library and the Museum of Loss & Memory. I was partnered with an artist based in London, who was moving about her city freely, as Melbourne officially became the most locked down city in the world. We shared readings from Ursula Le Guin and Virginia Woolf using the audio function on WhatsApp; the sounds of our respective cities captured in the background. This work was written in response to the recorded readings, but also the 260-days I had spent confined to my inner-city apartment.
Made after Cruskits & Crows, Beneath the Bluestone, there is a Swamp continues my creative exploration of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this work, my attention shifts to the pedestrian experience of the inner city, noting how pandemic restrictions such as lockdowns and reduced mobility shifted my attunement to the non-human and more than human.
From the 1950s through to the 1970s, the Patris brought tens of thousands of Greek migrants to Australia. One afternoon, as the vice-captain performed his port checks, he discovered a man crying and whispering into the ship’s hull. ‘What are you doing?’ he enquired, ‘I’m sending messages back to my loved ones in Greece,’ said the man (Kastelloriou 2017). For most post Second World War migrants the distance between their homeland and Australia was so great that they never returned. A year and a half ago, as I took a 20-hour flight from London to Perth, I couldn’t stop thinking of that man whispering into the Patris. In just over 50 years, technology, and the cost to use that technology, had essentially shrunken the globe - I felt none of the isolation that previous generations had experienced.
However, in a matter of weeks, as the coronavirus spread across Asia, Europe and the Americas, planes were grounded, and borders closed and I found myself isolated, dreaming of the global cities I love but could no longer access. I Was There but Now I’m Here was created in response – suffering from insomnia I embarked on a digital dérive, visiting my favourite global public spaces with the aid of Google Street View. As I clicked and scrolled, I wrote a diary logging what I was thinking, before capturing a screen shot that reminded me of a specific memory. Over the following weeks I stitched that screenshot into a pocket-sized tapestry that could be carried with me as I walked the now empty streets of Melbourne.
This work was shortlisted for the 2021 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award and exhibited at the Wangaratta Art Gallery, 2021.
Created in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Inhale is made from all the breaths cut from a pre-recorded online lecture. When my Art History course pivoted online I tried to maintain the quality of my students education, spending my nights cutting the intakes of breath from my lectures so that listening to them was more enjoyable. The inhale is something that happens just before an idea is released so these collective inhales speak to the way so many parts of our lives were paused during the pandemic, but also the breathlessness experienced by those that contracted the virus.
Academic, writer and artist Svetlana Boym once said that “ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time”.
The Empty Space Summit was a week-long symposium and workshop that took a close look at the ruins, empty spaces and forgotten parts of Melbourne.
Led by multidisciplinary artist Jarra Karalinar Steel and mixed-media conceptual artist Dr Clare McCracken, the five-day-long program dug deep into questions around the history, use, neglect and potential of different kinds of spaces across the city—including car parks, cemeteries, petrol stations, vacant buildings, and more.
The program concluded in the development of an immersive installation for the Parkade carpark in central Melbourne. For one night only the things that Melbournians, missed, longed and yearned for during their second 111-day lockdown were realised into the night. Called Exhale the work was a city-wide archive documenting what had been scarified to keep our community safe.
Support by MPavilion and Bloomberg Philanthropies, exhibited as part of Melbourne Design Week, 2021.
