Their collaborative practice consists of discursive performance, painting, sound, video and object-based explorations of the intersections of desire and control at various ‘sites’ - from an underwear and wire fencing factory in Melbourne’s CBD, to Dante’s hell, to rainbows.
Creating theatrical performances, props, backdrops, drawings and prints, with archival images and texts, their work is playful, intimate and poetic.
Recent projects include ‘Hell-o’ Octopus 19, Gertrude (2019) and ‘Scenes…not in wood but in speech’ Melbourne Art Theatre (2018). In 2021, they will exhibit at Bargoonga Nganjin Library, develop work through Test Sites, City of Melbourne and complete a residency at Bundanon supported through Australia Council for the Arts.
Making Rainbows
We are collaborating on a site-specific project including installation, sound-works and a pop-up bookshop exploring childhood, bookstores and rainbows, figured as both glimmering and dangerous.
The project will take place over two weeks in Howey Place, Melbourne, the original site of early 20th century Melburnian entrepreneur E W Cole’s book arcade. Cole espoused the Oneness of Man through worldwide English literacy and used the symbol of the rainbow as the trademark of his book empire.
His books are complex documents of a particular white colonial attitude to learning and childhood. Through Making Rainbows we want to explore childhood imagination, to make visible some of the less comfortable elements of Cole’s legacy, and to re-appropriate the rainbow as a strange, messy, slippery varied thing, not a symbol of universal oneness.
This project expands ways of learning and imagining that aren’t around the primacy of the English language or obedience to authority. The project will reverberate throughout Howey Place.