Stardust Residency, August + September 2024: Tilda Clarke

I embarked on a month-long journey to Mparntwe from Gadigal land. Through revisiting landscapes I played in as a child, I came back to Her. It was an emotional ride. Forgotten memories flooded back to me through timeless travel, moving through ever-changing landscapes and endless horizons. I remembered how she felt seeing this magical scene for the first time.

The desert gave me silence

A place for reflection

Beauty within isolation

The desert showed me it’s parallels with illness

Lonely, abandoned, feared

adapting and surviving within the harshest of conditions,

The innate resilience and wisdom that comes with both.

She showed me death, death that comes in a place like this

Death followed alongside the thousands of kms of stretched roads.

You didn’t know

But your body gives back to the bodies that need your body to survive.

We need bodies to survive.

The pilgrimage to the red centre has been something I’ve wanted to do for years but been unable to due to illness. Not sure if my body was ready for this trip. I was merely surviving at some points but I made it regardless.

I spent 6 weeks in material research at Watch This Space. Playing, exploring and testing materials I collected on the way. Exploring new forms of creating like natural dying and collage. I dove deep into practice which I haven’t been able to do for some time.

Depicting the things I struggle to speak with words. Conveying my internal world through material exploration, I found myself playing with textiles (a medium I connect with body, skin and flesh), playing with tension, weight and sensory experiences. Connecting and contrasting materials creating poetics in form.

TAiR June 2023: Sanche Zev Weinstein

My residency began after a long drive with my partner (whom I subjected to constant roadside stops for photographs from Broken Hill (Wilyakali country) to Kaurna land and a two-day dream-like stop-off in Umoona, Coober Pedy. I arrived at Mpartwe at night, leaving me with a sense of disorientation and exhaustion.

Waking up the next morning covered in red dust, I attempted to brush off the undealt with anxiety that seemed to follow me into the desert and drove to the gallery. I pulled out a chair and sat down to confront my existing project, an archive of sound, print works, and photographs I intended to collate into a zine for the Watch This Space zine fair. This was, however, blatantly interrupted by the rain, which started and did not stop for several days, bringing with it the flooding of the Todd River. I spent this time walking up and down the Todd contemplating sayings I had heard around the flood, “If you’ve seen the Todd flow three times, you’re a local” or “Anyone who sees the Todd River flow three times falls in love with the Alice.” Reflecting on the contradictions and false romanticisms these proverbs held, I managed to engage in a sense of motivation just as the rivers dried and the sun returned. 

I had spent the past six months before my residency calling pay phones across the country but mainly in remote areas, including Mparntwe and some roadhouses along the Tanami. I considered these recordings experiments using the phonebooths as a field recorder or mapping device. During my residency, I began making Xerox prints, transcribing the conversations onto old pieces of a5 paper I had brought. After listening to people’s interpretations of the prints in my studio, I realized the conversations as poetry—a collaboration between myself and those who pick up the phone through happenstance. 


Wanting to explore a connection between poetry and landscape, I took found images collected of arial photographs from around the NT, SA, and WA to begin systematically altering the prints onto the same a5 paper. This was a simple process of photocopying the same image over and over again until it fell away to just the ink dots and lines. My aim was to take these print works and somehow incorporate them into one zine with my photographs of landscapes I had taken on the road with my 6x6 film camera. 


In the process of my studio work I also started making new photographs around town which have the potential to become a separate body of work as a soft response to the curfew, exploring how simple rights most take for granted can forcibly and violently be taken away and others may continue to enjoy these spaces with little thought. I approached this as a daily practice or routine going out every day from 6pm exploring the town meditatively as though I was listening to it. Photographing things such as buildings, rocks, trees, the river and how these landscapes converge and relate. 

The outcome of my residency was mostly a great sense of appreciation for the learning that time spent on Arrernte land at WTS had given me. A highlight for me would no doubt be brining my zine together just in time for the zine fair and sharing a table with all the other amazing artist while still folding my zines because I always leave things to the last minute.

TAiR June 2023: Kori Miles, Journal Entry # 1

The last six months leading up to this residency have been a lot on me, emotionally and mentally. I had taken a break from making any new art as I recovered from burn-out and a broken heart and ongoing feelings of grief/loss (still recovering).

Coming into the studio residency here, I felt like I had been in harvest mode, collecting materials to experiment and play with. As soon as I got to Mparntwe, I got really sick. Twice in a row. Switching into a mode of self-care and isolation (out of concern of infecting others) I began working on these paint imprints on panels of leather quite obsessively.

This (sort of pattern-making/stamping/transfer) technique I created came from a moment when I returned from Aotearoa to my garden in Naarm. I had previously repurposed dried take (the section of the harakeke that is discarded in the process of preparing the whenu for raranga) to make garden stakes. Noticing that the ways that they have dried have formed different shapes on their tips, many of them resemble koru or other symbols in kowhaiwhai. I started using them to curiously and playfully mark make with body paint on my own skin. I then extended this process to involve two other takataapui artists, J Davies and Guy Ritani, mark making on each other's body in a documented private performance ritual.

In my loneliness in isolation, I sought comfort and intimacy in this process, by replacing the live body with leather off-cuts, the most skin-like material I could source. I have felt the act of mark making on this leather can be performed almost anywhere, whether it be a studio at WatchThisSpace, or in the comfort of my own bed, this leather skin wrapped around me like a lover as I press into its softness. I have since sourced more leather panels, generously donated to me by James and Elliot at Elbow Workshop, to continue playing with this process.

I work quite intuitively, so many thoughts and feelings have arisen from this process so far, but here some dot points to try and articulate what I think this new body of work might be doing:

- Attempting to find ways to revive lost and unknown/forgotten/unremembered

knowledge through engaging with cultural materials in lateral ways (and/or attempting

to generate future takataapui folklore)

- Finding ways to meditate on and process ongoing grief, as we are faced with more

and more in the face of climate change and mass extinction

- Creating and playing with textures that I find immense sensation and pleasure in

TAiR April 2023: Anna Cunningham, Journal #1

I spent some time at local waste and reuse sites as a kind of generative blueprint. I toured the tip/Re-Discovery Centre, a scrap metal treasure trove-come-artists home, the Repair Café’ community event, and Anton’s Recycling. Foraging and repurposing seems a necessary way of life here where it’s so remote.

 

I also spent some time attempting to extract Spinifex resin for casting. Which is traditionally used by indigenous Australians for weapon making. I am interested in what the material can do.

My amateur science experiments have been mostly failures of sorts, or more like going to weird and extreme lengths trying to tame tempered and temperamental materials, and them not behaving in the way I imagine they could and would like them too. Making recipes to illogical ends. Cuspy edges court discomfort in ambiguity, and a messy entangled fray of porous half-formed thoughts that are then completed by another, forming a sprawling debris but with details.

 

The glass I found at the tip didn’t fuse in the kiln – something about its ‘coefficiency of expansion,’ which is a measurement of the rate glass will expand and contract through heating and cooling processes. Too many different kinds of glass mixed in together, and too many impurities. I decided to make them drawings instead.

 

I thought I found the Spinifex resin - these black clumped-together balls attached at the base of the plant, surrounded by ants. They look like black mustard seeds and smell sweet like honey. They leave charcoal-like marks on the tarpaulin as I thrash them. But through various processes of heating, I couldn’t make the kiti from these (presumably) resin clumps. Really at this point, in my naivety, I am just cooking dirt. That, or an ochetellus flavipes ant's nest. There’s humour in the tribulations. Trying to find the right amount, what holds, and what works. And I wonder if it’s play, or a looping (& loopy) attempt at repair.

NTWC x WTS Writers Residency, March 2023: Victoria Alondra, Journal

Invitation 

By Victoria Alondra

Riot 

Stifled screams metamorphose 

into paper and pen. Riots 

against cages. We rupture 

agony through sentence. Tear apart 

metal and metaphor. We are 

breaking 

free 

A brightly lit, windowfront studio on Gap Road is an invitation to witness the subversive relations and intimate universes that exist within and in spite of the current political and social dynamics of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and the wider colony that is Australia. My infant daughter tugs at my face and coos, declaring that she’s ready for a snooze. As she is soothed to sleep, I wonder about the boundless micro-resistances that take place every day on this street but are overshadowed by a narrative of fear, dismay and hatred. How many people are robbed of bearing witness to the moments of joy, connection and survival that draw breath beyond the asphyxiation of ‘race’ and other identity labels? My gaze turns to the street. A group of teenagers roar laughter as they walk past. Old friends embrace each other and grieve the loss of a loved one. A toddler chases a butterfly. Gap Road buzzes with life as my daughter sleeps in sunbathed silence in her makeshift bed. 

Figure 1 - A white cloud hovers over Gap Road, Arrernte Country

Musing about this residency has been difficult, largely because artistic expression is a consequence of my life rather than a choice. Poetry emerged as a language of life and as catharsis in the face of swelling fascism and looming climate catastrophes. Existence is a fraught, tender thing. 

“Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation." – Arundhati Roy. 

Witnessing is an exercise of empathy and dissolving power dynamics through the creation of shared experiences. Where power exists, I believe that invitation is what bridges the difference between cold observation and solidarity. Not every story is ours to know. 

Figure 2 - A desert full moon is positioned behind young trees, surrounded by a purple sky 

Poetry was a sanctuary away from the social service sector that tested my ethics by pushing me to collude with policing and child prisons at the expense of communities. Privileged workers, even the good ones, are always afforded the luxury of returning to their lives. The job – along with any repercussions of their decisions – is left at the door when they exit the building, competing for oxygen. Suffocating spaces have created tension between my voice and safety, often coercing me into choosing silence as a means of survival. Shame and cowardice follow silence like a shadow. Loneliness, a natural consequence of being surrounded by cold observers in both personal and (so-called) professional spaces. I became a shell of myself: quiet and aloof as I also dealt with losing thirteen loved ones within a year. Cumulative sorrow chipped away at my heart until it became a pile of shattered glass in my chest, and hope, a jester that mocked reality. 

Monetising Oppression 

Despotism wrings our kin 

withered. Blood churned into 

currency by ostiaries in the name 

of profession. Degrees. 

A dialogue depraved, whispered 

in a language that pretends 

to be melody while stifling our screams 

in the abyss of policy and politics. 

Sector employment a velvet slipper 

for pale feet office perks aeroplane 

vacations. A noose 

slipped over a child's brown neck. 

Altered to the cellular level, thousands of memories swarmed and revealed themselves not as memories but as parallel worlds existing in synchronicity. This month has been a visceral exercise of space/time-travel through the vast universe that is my body. Somatic poetics gifted moments of power where experiences were re-storied away from narratives that make memory out of living being. Time is not linear – a concept that challenges my Western indoctrination. 

Picking joyful memories like wild roses, I bring them to my family for us to enjoy. The celestial aroma draws out the grief we’ve shared over the stoic resignations of our communities when forced into corners with no passage out. We now build escape tunnels everywhere, rejoicing over the tales of valiant joy and defiance that were never witnessed. In this re-write, our collective grief overcomes inertia and furiously catapults toward emancipation at the speed of dripping honey. 

I am – we are – mosaics of the consequences of modern life and ancestral blood memory. My heart bursts into butterflies at the thought of this cosmic synchronicity. Worlds of possibility unfurl before me, wild and full of colour.

Figure 3 - A rainbow and a stormy sunset make magic over Arrernte Country 

Marigolds 

Eruptions 

of a future yet 

to arrive. We chase 

freedom like sunflowers 

follow the sun. 

Ignore 

obituaries 

that gather like moths to light. Fluttering 

before falling 

into memory. 

Our pain 

a portal

to anotherworldy future 

where obituaries are flowers 

blooming story from death 

leaving behind 

marigold fields 

There are universes where colonialism never occurred and my loved ones are alive. This is where I choose to exist, without negating the darkness of a reality that tries to suffocate us at every turn. This is my resistance. If I am here, it is to be joyful. It is to love and to create spaces that are medicine and healing. Our ancestors are our guides, walking alongside us and inviting us to create the worlds they dreamed we would: full of ineffable joy. Sometimes, that joy looks like a toddler chasing a butterfly on Gap Road under the desert sun.

Pop up residency, March 2023: Ellanor Webb Journal entry

I’ve spent this month at WTS mostly creeping around alone after hours, and trying to understand the origins, intentions and implications of the ‘Australian’ photo book. It’s hard to really know when the first photo book was published here, but copies I’ve come across begin as early as the 1920s. 



I’ve been thinking about these objects, and the images they hold as part of our ‘national’ photographic archive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if we look back in time, dominant images sit ready for us to consume once more, decades after their creation. We recognise certain depictions of this place as the 'lucky country' and 'land of plenty', where one experiences an 'Australian dream': messages (or myths) which arose after European invasion, and which subsist to this day. 



So what part did photography play in perpetuating these identities? How did images made on this continent during the early decades of photography further the agenda of the colonial state, rather than document alternate realities to diffuse, detract from, and counteract its mission? 



I’ve come to understand, photography was not considered an art form here until long after international audiences and institutions had done so. Instead, the photograph was made and displayed as a kind of marketing mechanism, a great champion and smokescreen of a homogenous national identity that, of course, many felt they didn’t belong to. 



As well as looking at these photo books, I’ve also been tearing them apart - mostly in the literal sense, to collage, but also in the way you might “tear something to shreds” in an analytical, questioning sense. I’ve found many moments of humour in this process, but also a responsibility to remain critical. It is easy to laugh at the subjects portrayed: beach, industry, happy white citizen, monument, leisure activity, *repeat for 80-200 pages*. It is even easier to find yourself deeply disturbed. 



For now, the research continues. Thank you to WTS for this month-long opportunity to stare at over-saturated images for far too long, to scan a bunch of shit and to spend time understanding the root of my curiosities, the histories of this place, and the identities portrayed in images made here.

TAiR September 2022: Liss Fenwick, Jounal #1

ingkwepeye

On the way to the WTS studio I walk along the Todd river where there are many trees hollowed out by termites. The insects leave  behind enough tree to ensure it can keep growing; most of the larger gums have been hollowed out and subsequently grown into incredible forms. Oddly a gum just outside the Todd tavern had a termite mound smashed off the base. Arrernte land has been very rich in termite activity so far. Last Friday I learned some local words for termites from Veronica Dobson, an Arrernte woman, at the rangelands seminar… ingkwepeye for termite mound. 

At the residency I’ve been editing on a video for an upcoming group show at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), curated by Darwin-based curator Carmen Ansaldo. The exhibition includes work by NT artists, both Aboriginal and Balanda. 

The video work I’m creating for the show includes termites that I have been filming for years who live underground on my family’s block in the rural district of Humpty Doo. I feed them books, make videos of them, and collect the remains of the book they leave behind. I developed some new techniques in the recently for videoing them in macro, making the termites supersized. 

Termites has been a bit of a theme of my last month of travel too. It seems there is a human nest of termite lovers emerging from the red dirt of the NT. At Kalkaringi, I met Gregory Crocetti, who is working on a book with the Gurinji people about termites/Tamarra in their language. When I turned up in Alice, Levi Mclean (from Tennant Creek) said ‘you have to meet my friend Mattie’. Mattie is doing their honours degree on the pavement termites common out this way on Arrernte land, looking at the hydrology. On Friday I went to the Rangelands seminar at CDU where I heard about ‘Desert people, desert art and spinifex termite ecosystems’ from a multidisciplinary team, Veronica Dobson, Dr. Fiona Walsh, Sally Mumford, Matilda Nelson (Mattie). If you love termites too, drop by and see me at Watch This Space. 

https://www.nccart.com.au/2022-exhibitions/retribution%3A-what-happens-next%3F

TAiR August 2022: Tilly Glascodine, Journal #1

On my way to Watch this Space I walk from East Side through the dusty streets, across the red bridge, and along the dry river bed. I have been enjoying this time thinking about the ways Mparntwe has surprised me. Or maybe not surprised me but wasn’t necessarily what I expected. But also now I can’t really remember what it was that I thought it would be. 

At the workshops we have been speaking about futures and what that means. We have been talking about wanting to feel a way forward through desire, rather than necessarily knowing or having some universal plan.

I have been thinking a lot about, what someone at the workshop called, “the glue”—like what holds things together, or as Ursula Le Guin would maybe say, what goes in the bag that is the story of the world. 

If no one is going to tell me to do it, if there isn’t the threat of punishment or poverty, I wonder what I would do? 

It is a luxury (or maybe actually a necessity) to have time to think, to rest, and to see what I do when I don’t really have to do much at all.

TAiR June 2022: Leonie Brialey, Journal #2

Last time I talked about bigness and I hadn’t even seen Uluṟu yet. Felt silly and humbled thinking I’d made a big thing then seeing Uluṟu, which is, of course, really properly big. I still have no idea about bigness. I think this is the same with death and grief. We can have ideas about it, but the thing itself, bigger and older and longer and wider than we can fathom in one moment, takes walking around, walking around in different directions, seeing in different light, by sunset, by sunrise, by day, by night, many times, for a long time.

This time has gone quickly but it’s been a big time. It’s been a big time of processing grief in a way I both could have and couldn’t have predicted. It feels awkward to be having my own private grief journey here in this place that is so obviously the centre of the essential crisis of this country, the essential grief and trauma. But of course all of these things are connected. I wouldn’t be here if not for Katharine who I’m grieving and who is somehow everywhere here, in strange ways, for a place she never physically visited in her life. But she’s here in people, in protest, in the landscape, walking around with her long legs, flying around with the birds. I show Ness my big thing in progress and the picture of the thing I’m trying to make. She says, “you’ve made it taller,” and I realise I’ve made Katharine.

I keep thinking about how death isn’t an end but a transformation. I think about the transformations that clay undertakes, from rock to soft earth to hard rock again, and the way working with clay seems to be a real thing here, and what that’s about (ideas ranging from the landscape itself to it simply being trendy). I think about the spirits in everything that don’t die, that transform and hold on and change shape for hundreds of thousands of millions of years and about how trends and empires rise and fall and crumble and what remains is the spirit of the land, the spirit of people, in things like the earth, in things we make and do in their honour.


Leonie Brialey is a cartoonist and musician from Boorloo Perth where she’s recently returned after living in Naarm Melbourne.

TAiR June 2022: Leonie Brialey, Journal #1

When I drive into Mparntwe it’s overcast, suggesting rather than threatening rain, and for the next couple of days it does rain, the East and West MacDonnells shrouded in low clouds. I’m told this is rare and I shouldn’t expect to see this weather again during my time here. Sure enough in a couple of days the sun comes out and the sky is clear as a bell or birdsong. 

It’s been a little over a week or so now, I’m feeling humbled and raw by the bigness of this place. I mean bigness in terms of time, space, feeling, intensity, sky and rock.

I both was and wasn’t expecting this bigness. I’ve started work on something which will be bigger than anything I’ve made with the combo of my hands and clay before. In my short history of making things with my hands and clay I’ve only made short/ small things. The bigness of this place calls for something bigger. 

Before I left a friend read my tarot that began with Death and ended with the Knight of Cups. Her interpretation was that of learning of hold grief, transforming the flag of death into a cup. Between applying and meaning to be here this time last year, covid, lockdowns, the death of my best friend have all changed this journey and what it means for me being here. This is what I’m thinking about looking at these red rocks that demarcate and contain everything here: how to hold love, how to hold grief.

Leonie Brialey is a cartoonist and musician from Boorloo Perth where she’s recently returned after living in Naarm Melbourne.

TAiR May 2022: Stone Motherless Cold, Journal #2

So as the month comes to an end, Ive realised that since Ive been here, it has been a time of getting back to Country, and resting and rejuvenating, embracing the slow country life (in comparison to Naarm) A time of sitting with families, working on angkentye (language) and learning more through Apmere (Country).

Ive done my lil drills bits with inernte beans, afterwards showing my Nana, who said that doing it with the drill was the lazy way, telling me I need to collect more and do it the proper way – So I need to wait for the right time to collect and finding sustainable amounts of inernte beans

So my garment creation will take a different turn, with the creation of a dress from a canvas, that has been adorned with paintings. Waiting for the right time to ask Nana and my aunties to sit around and paint. Reminding me of the importance of time, and waiting for the right time to accomplish activities, the comparison with Western linear understanding of time and the Arrernte circular understanding of time, with seasons and change. And I will endeavour to create other pieces, (headpieces and jewellery) from other natural sources that are available at the time.

Ive been working on some of my digital art, the canvas that I can always bring with me. As well as visual work, layers of transparent ‘canvases’ to dissect pictures of myself on Country – different layers of Country, and time and experiences not seen in a 2D picture.

TAiR May 2022: Stone Motherless Cold, Journal #1

It’s a 30min bike ride into WTS from apmere atyinhe (my home), cycling along the Stuart Highway and through Ntaripe (the Gap). Along the ride, different tree and plant peoples on the way keep catching my eyes, the look and feel of their skin, reminding me of the different skins and textures of human peoples.

As the election is coming up, my families and I have had lots of yarns into how the politics affect tyerrtye-mape (Blak people) here – the classic lies and empty promises that warlpele politics continues to make time and time again, how Nana hasn’t seen anything change in their time, and has come to expect nothing but empty words. How the Albanese government is committed to mining and fracking in the NT, in conjunction with the Uluru Statement, which is backed by the mining companies themselves. Nana reminding me, that as we were created from dust, coming from the ground itself, our health in inherently linked to the health of Apmere (Country) and that many more peoples (human, animal peoples, plants peoples, land peoples etc) are going to be continuously affected eg. Dialysis for human peoples. Reminding me of the textures, and the inexplicable link between Arrernte-mape and Apmere, the similar textures of plant peoples and human peoples becomes obvious.

Stone Motherless Cold is an Arrernte drag gem, currently based in Naarm. Smooth and sensual, bold and graphic, this crystalline trophy posing as humanoid. She is a drag artist, producer, writer and visual artist, celebrating spaces of Blak queer futurism. Ms Cold is head of the Motherless Collective. 1st Runner Miss First Nations 2021 and title winner of the VIC NAIDOC LGBTQIA+ 2019 event.

https://www.instagram.com/stone_motherlesscold/

https://www.instagram.com/stone.dco/