Shell Space Salon - ‘Memories of Sea and Land’

Join us for an intimate, candle-lit evening, on the new moon; weaving together film screenings, performance, music and spoken word poetry. With an immersive banquet, including mulled wine, cacao and nibbles at the magical ‘Shell Space’ in Brunswick.

To celebrate the launch of Shell Space Salon, we will present a screening of short films by artists Michaela Meadow and Eloise Maree. Both films explore relationships to landscapes and memory, merge visuals with spoken word, and employ the use of analogue photographic processes including wet plate and super 8. We will also listen to a performance by Whelk, the musical and spoken word project of writer Manisha Anjali and harpist Genevieve Fry. The evening will conclude with an informal discussion with all artists engaged by Hilary Green and the audience.

This is the first edition of a monthly salon at Shell Space, designed to bring together diverse artistic disciplines, spark inspiration and stimulate playful conversations. Each month, we invite a selection of artists in different mediums to come together and showcase their work. The evening will also be a chance to connect with other creatives. Bring an open heart and something that inspires you to share, such as an object or art book.

Date Friday 5th July

Time 7.30 - 10pm

Programme:

7.30 - Arrive - receive your drink and nibbles and get comfy

8 pm - film screenings begin

‘Anamneses’ by Eloise Maree

‘An Island Beneath the Sea’ by Michaela Meadow

8.30pm - musical and spoken word performance by Whelk

9.10pm - Q.A with Hilary Green and artists

Films:

'An Island Beneath the Sea' - Michaela Meadow (10 mins)

A woman awakes in an unfamiliar landscape. A mirror of rock and sea, a shell swept up offers its secret. She steps through a portal and swims across to a body of land beneath the waves. A watery underworld; a reflection of her own interior.

An Island Beneath the Sea is a mythopoetic narrative conjured in analogue photography, moving image and poetry.

This is part of an ongoing body of work by Michaela Meadow responding to the intrinsic connections to other-than-human worlds, as well as interconnections between our bodies, minds and elements of water. She believes the camera is an effective device for presenting new ways of looking and feeling, for what she likes to call the ‘oceanic unconscious’.

This project is made in collaboration with writer and poet Manisha Anjali; a specialist in dreams, visions and hallucinations. Manisha is both the model for this project and has contributed her spoken word poetics in response to the visuals.

Anamneses - Eloise Maree (12 mins)

Anamneses is a visual and audial exploration of photography’s relationship with land. Eloise uses cinema and wet plate photography to explore the liminalities and dynamism of landscapes, as well as field recordings and piano to expand on these landscapes' histories and beauty, and their fraught relationships to photo-taking.

This slow, steady and dreamlike confluence encourages reflection on the complex dualities of historiography, undeveloped and developed landscapes, erasure and trace, forgetting and remembering.

An archive of natural and historic tensions, Anamneses is an act of memory-making unearthing multiple, layered identities of place, revealing the landscape anew, and as seen through a feminine and feminist lens. Anamneses aspires to be a thought-provoking and arresting film, with its reflections on the complexities of photo-taking, memory making and place identity serving as springboards for discussion.

Performance:

Whelk

Whelk is an ambient and wavy collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Genevieve Fry and artist Manisha Anjali. Whelk is sensory and lulling, consisting of ethereal harp, textural percussion and otherworldly incantations.

Genevieve Fry is a multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Naarm. Interested in exploratory music drawing inspiration from the natural world, their soundscapes encourage an inward journey touching on deep time, memory and sense of place.

Manisha is a poet and artist. She is known for conjuring mystical and transcendental imagery in performance.

Artists:

(Film)

(Film)

(Spoken word)

(Music/Harp)

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We respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, who are the Traditional Owners of the land on which our event takes place, and pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was and always will be, Aboriginal land.

Host or Publisher Shell Space Salon