Island_Cultures

BACKGROUND: This project applied artistic research methods to examine if feminist materialism accounts can provide nascent ways for rethinking nautical place in order to investigate concepts of seascape, moving image and ritual. The work drew upon Flanagan (2001) a historian who posits we must ‘turn around and look back into the shadows before you can go on’. Akin to Julie Gough and Fiona Tan who create ethnographic artworks, as interventions into knowledge production. CONTRIBUTION: “Island_Cultures” are 2 original performance-art works recorded as internet scale one-channel video depicting a woman standing in the midst of elemental forces -on a floating platform timtumili minanya/River Derwent ‘Womb of the World’ an incantation to this former whale nursery before colonial diktat - on a tessellated slate substrate ‘Self-Portrait(Mirror)’ enacted as cypher and salve on the unceded lands of the Pydairrerme people. For Parisi (2013) ‘thought is…composed of conjunctions and disjunctions that expose the interferences, asymmetries, gaps, and granularity of contingencies’ the research found that material feminist examination was able to reveal marginal narratives within artworks as containers of culture, memory, and the performance between the known and the cipherable. SIGNIFICANCE: Curated by international net.art critic Josephine Bosma in ‘Appearances’ a group exhibition. Upstream Gallery (alongside world class artists). Including an interview for LIMA an international centre of expertise of media art. 1/40 preselected works (among 162) artists must demonstrate a sustained association with the island, judging panel included Janet Carding, Director of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.