Samantha is an emerging creative practitioner with an amalgamated multifaceted background in festivals, technical production, arts administration, independent filmmaking, community arts and producing. She is currently the creative producer of the chronic pain and disability-led Melbourne circus collective, Get Well Circus.
Her independent practice is grounded in social impact and intersectional feminism, and has been recognised for her work on a number of key grassroots socially-minded arts projects including Safer Venues WA (Perth), Camp Conscious Collective (for Melbourne Fringe 2019), YUCK Circus, The Invisible Illness Project (Perth), and now with Get Well Circus.
Samantha is also studying her Masters of Cultural Leadership at NIDA with passion for cultural research and transformation.
The current focus of her work is on advocacy for her community, drawing on her meaningful lived experiences of chronic pain and illness.
The Waiting Game (Work in development)
In a research study of 1000 emergency room patients, it was found that women were made to wait on average 15 minutes longer than male counterparts with the same pain scores.
The image of the classic bead maze toy is synonymous with the lived experience of medical waiting rooms and waiting to access treatments for the chronic pain and illness communities within a biased, overwhelmed medical system.
The Waiting Game is a large-scale, sculptural and multi-functional installation bead maze toy and public art project. The sculpture design is a load-bearing outdoor circus apparatus that aesthetically emulates the sun-faded, 80s-era toy in colour, shape and invited interaction with its large styrene beads across its custom-fabricated steel pipes with three aerial points for performances.
Designed to be temporarily installed in versatile outdoor and parkland spaces, this work aims to bring resonating symbolism to the window views of patients in hospitals and care facilities. Get Well Circus, a chronic pain-led collective of performance artists in Naarm, will lead the public art activation with circus performances that draw on elements of physical theatre, comedy and acrobatics on the bead maze to subvert this powerful community icon to reclaim what it looks like to ‘wait’ to access care.