Overlapping

September 22, 2024 Gracia & Louise

Recently, Shimmering

From the celebration of RMIT School of Art’s Gold & Silversmithing’s Here’s Something I’ve Been Wanting To Show You exhibition currently at Design Hub, which we had the privilege of creating a folded catalogue-poster for and a website profiling the sixty-plus artists, to a third trip across the stage for a page to experience Oscar©, this time with Jarryd Madden in the title role, making exquisite back and forth rolling curves like a child’s pull-along toy as he and Constance make an entrance in Act I, and heartbreakingly laid bare in Act II, it’s been a whirl, a delicious whirl. And so, assembled here, a pool of what has come to fruition of late.

Explore the RMIT Gold & Silversmithing Alumni exhibition site, and download the catalogue-poster

Head to Fjord Review to read my response to Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar©

Pictured here, earlier at the world premiere of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s beautifully devastating Oscar©, drawn from the interweaving of Oscar Wilde’s life and works, The Nightingale and the Rose and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and again the following night, from a different vantage point. Rendered a Nightingale in a tree, all three nights, building a red rose “out of music by moonlight” in the darkness of the theatre. Also pictured, our artists’ book, Restoring corridors, the image component of which is currently on display at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery as part of the 2024 National Works on Paper exhibition on until the 24th of November.

2024 National Works on Paper
Until Sunday 24th November, 2024
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington, Victoria 3931
11am–4pm, Tuesday–Sunday
(Closed public holidays)

Vote for your favourite work in the 2024 National Works on Paper People’s Choice Award

Interwoven with this are works that use the natural environment as a recurring motif, ones where landscape rather than country come to the fore. artists here present the bush, coastlines, rocks and birds, and our relationship with nature as a whole. This is done through various media and metaphors, such as tides and waves symbolising human experience and forces of change greater than our own that are beyond history, as it were. this is nature as dynamic, transformational, powerful, with artists sharing in that. Working in this way we have Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison’s Restoring corridors that emphasises biodiversity restoration, encouraging viewers to actively participate in repairing habitats. … The invitation that these works on paper offer is one of intimacy and depth. For all their difference in content and form, the medium itself is one that seems connected to a richness and tradition beyond our present. In that space, at once humble and direct and caring, we see a counterpoint to the flashy, isolated, momentary quality of the digitised life. It is a good thing that paper reminds us of our very humanity, that it knits together the diversity of where we are, that it travels to us with stories of where it is from and what it has done. This is, of course, grounded in our local reading of Country, of indigeneities that span the continent, all of which are expressions that run alongside paper as well. That this year’s award demonstrates so clearly what we have always known — that art matters beyond itself — is a reminder that there is still hope and justice in a world as cruel and unjust as ours. For that alone, we can only be grateful as witnesses to an art as resolute as time itself.

Kelly Fliedner, <em>A message, a Point of Connection, a Gesture to Where We Are</em>

Joining this assortment, a collage commission to illustrate Competing Choreographies: 10 years of the Keir Choreographic Award edited by Angela Conquet and Philipa Rothfield. Across pages 202–205 you will find our response to how to document dance.

We created a pair of collages to choose from, and a final black and white version for publication. One which including details from Lilian Steiner’s 2018 KCA piece, Memoirs for Rivers and the Dictator, featuring the vibrational silhouette of Lilian herself, resisting the solidity of becoming earthenware circa 1790–1810, and the other, a detail from Prue Lang’s 2018 KCA piece, Yoni, featuring the silhouettes of Lauren Langlois, Tara Jade Samaya, and Amber McCartney.

Whether it is writing about dance, or collaging about dance, or creating a website to showcase the exquisite work of Gold & Silversmithing alumni, and the opportunity to see a detail of our artists’ book, Restoring corridors, fit for a Nightingale, in the gallery, it is an honour, a pleasurable honour. And one of many overlapping parts, just the way the two of us like it.

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Tracing a moving outline (I)
Thinking of a transitory tapestry of images that settle on the skin after a performance — including a detail from Prue Lang’s 2018 KCA piece, Yoni, featuring the vibrational silhouettes of Lauren Langlois, Tara Jade Samaya, and Amber McCartney resisting the solidity of becoming earthenware circa 1790–1810 — can collage fix a fleeting encounter, document the persistent pattern of perpetual change, as different source materials push up against each other, perhaps.

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Tracing a moving outline (II)
Thinking of a transitory tapestry of images that settle on the skin after a performance — including details from Lilian Steiner’s 2018 KCA piece, Memoirs for Rivers and the Dictator, featuring the vibrational silhouette of Lilian herself, resisting the solidity of becoming earthenware circa 1790–1810 — can collage fix a fleeting encounter, document the persistent pattern of perpetual change, as different source materials push up against each other, perhaps.

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Tracing a moving outline (II), 2024, digital collage