My work is dedicated to exploring the intersections between cinema and contemporary art. My story world, the City of Luxville, is born of this exploration. Writing, producing and creating this world in public since 2015 when I had an epiphany about how much time I had left. My mumma had just died and I couldn’t breathe. I began a deep search for understanding my connection to this place, and the place my mum had adopted after her home of Ireland. She just left me here. I feel I don’t really belong anywhere. An outsider, voyeur, witness. But I do belong to people and the people that have my heart.

Recently I was funded by Creative Victoria to take this work further. Specifically to create works that address what I see as the appalling lack of heart in contemporary leadership and governance. How do I, the daughter of immigrants, create the backstory of this tale based on the actual regional city my mother choose to call home, after home? I hoped to work with local Wadawurrung artists and leaders to be guided in the story of this place. The funding gave me the opportunity to work with two incredible sisters – Tammy and Deanne Gilson.

This post begins a series of six to witness me as witness, worlding a fabulous* backstory that respects and honours what has gone before, and that exists at the edges when it should be resolutely centred.

“The Black Movie” was a provocative one-night event of experimental cinema that ran on Friday November 22nd and Saturday November 23rd, 1970 in Manhattan. It was the creation of a group of twenty young African-American artists and filmmakers who talked about their work as “activities in construction”, with reference to aesthetic strategies taken from the fields of architecture and revolutionary social change. Struck a chord.

Cinema and art are two of the most important aspects of our culture. I’d add dance and story. How often do you dance? I aim to dance every day.

Both cinema and art have the capacity to entertain, educate, and inspire. Ultimately to challenge us and ask us questions. However, there is a special relationship between cinema and art. Cinema is able to take the ideas and images from art and present them in a new and exciting way. This allows us to see the world in a different light and to appreciate art in a new context.

But we are so accustomed to Hollywood moving image models – the mcdonalds of the moving image.

In a cinema darkly – a term I paraphrased from, I thought, the Ingmar Bergman film ‘Through A Glass Darkly’. It means to have an obscure or imperfect vision of reality. I’ve worn glasses since I was three years old, my eyesight is terrible however I will not wear a full prescription. Im not alone here I know now. The term however has a contentious origin. A favoured source, now, is from a poem by Arthur Clough, assistant to Florence Nightingale. His poem references the bible though so sources are not distinct. Regardless of the sources, the concept is agree, that we don’t see clearly now, but at the end of time, we will.

“Some true result will yet appear
Of what we are, together, here.”

Arthur Clough, 1819  – 1861

This is one of a series of posts about the Precious Fragments project funded by Creative Victoria. The funding is to support the development of backstory to the City of Luxville in a juxtaposition of Irish and Wadawurrung cultures to investigate place, identity and connection.

The Precious Fragments project will use three distinct languages:

• Gaeilge – Irish – this will be given in italics.
• Language – Wadawurrung – this will be given in CAPITALS.
• English – Australian – this will be given in Sentence Case.

*fabulous – a term coined by Mark Twain to define the mixing of fact and fiction.