(upbeat cello music)
- The body of work is called The Artist's Ballet,
and for the installation I have divided the work
into three or four parts.
A lot of things happened during the COVID year of 2020,
so a lot of this work is reflective of that.
(upbeat cello music)
So what you have here at The National,
is the film intersecting with the stills from the film,
which I turned into satin curtains.
So it was sort of like I created the performance,
which a curtain usually is the sort of staging preface,
if you like, for the performance.
I decided to embody the two together.
So the curtain not only presents
but it sort of is the performance.
(melancholic music)
The film part of The Artist's Ballet
was made at the end of 2019.
It was made for an exhibition for the Bendigo Art Gallery,
which then went on to open and close on the same day.
So I was left at the end of that incredible workshopping
and year previously of working towards The Artist's Ballet
and then having that happen.
So that was quite momentous,
and, of course, COVID was equally momentous,
especially all the lockdowns that we had in Melbourne.
So I found myself in the studio looking at making work
around the idea of my great aunt; Bessie Davidson
and her relationship with Margaret Preston.
Two artists at the early part of the 20th century
wrangling with being women artists in Paris for a decade,
and I was sort of interested to work that
with real dancers into a dance work
that really was an embodiment of these two artists,
but it could be two women artists of any time.
And that's how the footage
for the film component was created.
And I have been, over the last six or seven years,
been quite active in working with dancers
within my work and my practise.
I'm very interested in the intersection
between dance and visual art,
and particularly the first part of the 20th century,
especially around the avant-garde and the Ballets Russes,
and of course Dada,
and that's where the puppets come in
because I have long been making puppets
and responding to many of the Hannah Höch Dada puppets
and using various aspects of the human body
remodelled into sort of abstract forms,
along with looking at Sophie Taeuber-Arp
and other women artists of early part of Modernism.
It was a very interesting time for women
because it was actually,
a lot of them were also very cross-disciplinary,
which increasingly my work is and has been,
and also very much engaged with theatre.
And the very bright curtain behind me here
is called The Artist's Ballet Curtain Easels,
and it is really a sort of,
I guess a joyous aspect bringing the colour
because this other work uses black and white
and very much the satin quite degraded,
archival, if you like, sort of idea of the imagery
and then just a little bit of colour.