DANIELLE BAYNES (ACTOR/WRITER) AND ANDREW BURFORD (SOUND)

Baynes and Burford will create a short visual narrative film that explores the psychological impact of the climate crisis on young Australians. They are a writer/director and composer team, and through compelling visuals, rich music and sound design, they will explore the weight of responsibility that rests on the younger generations who ultimately bear the brunt of irreversible damage, face an unstable future, and are forced to be the loudest voices urgently demanding action. The film will explore this theme by looking at raw connection with our environment. Asking how do we continue to identify with a landscape facing extinction?
 

The film will be set on Bruny Island and follow a child who wakes alone in an island wilderness. A note has been left beside them: “Be back soon”. Frightened and dwarfed by their surroundings, they soon realise they must set out alone in the challenging landscape in search of their phantom protector. The child will face obstacles seemingly beyond their capacity. Their ability to survive will be tested. Slowly they will come to terms with the fact that no one is coming to save them and their ally is the environment itself, forming a surprising bond and rebirth of hope.

 

 

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RODNEY HALL (WRITER) AND IMOGEN HALL (PHOTOGRAPHER)

Rodney Hall will create a written project for 'Bruny Island’ in collaboration with his daughter and photographer Imogen Hall, who will produce a series of large scale colour photographs (allowing the light and dark to assert themselves). Together, they will collaboratively produce images, a field journal and texts.  This joint project will culminate in an exhibition and art book, accompanied by a video diary.

 

Rodney Hall’s text, ‘Bruny Island’ will be based around his experience of a landmark project with photographer David Moore (published by Collins as Australia: Image of a Nation 1850-1950).  The structure will take the form of a short prose rhapsody to respond to each of Imogen’s photographs, meanwhile embedding fragments of historical detail. There may be an overall ‘Tree’ of connections, an installation in the form of leaves, each one distilling the text to a single word. The precise form this Bruny Island project will take will emerge as the photographs are taken and selected, so the collaboration takes shape as a living work of art.

 

Imogen Hall’s research uses original series of landscape photographs as a means to explore philosophic and religious tenets by applying their principles to landscapes of cultural significance. She uses medium format digital cameras with a Phase One back, to create very large scale photographs filled with space and evoking the power of natural forces of light, terra and season. The aspect of a Bruny Island winter which calls for exploration lies with the predominate monochromes of a coastal winter; black and white. The tree trunks are dark dark with rain and light from the low sun is bouncing off the kinetic wet surfaces of land and sea.

 

 

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SARA MAHER (PAINTER)

Sarah Maher will create a series of paintings. Maher is interested in coastal sites as boundary zones, offering a certain spaciousness that might evoke a stream of consciousness - a meditation on discomfort. She envisages a series of human scaled ink and pigment works on paper, suggestive of aerial and atmospheric dimensions of the physical landscape - resonant fields where the inner self meets the intangible otherness of expanded environment. These mesmeric watery spaces waver into muted, half-lit realms where the sensory immediacy of landscape, and the weight of memory and emotion in place coincide. Tiny collected shoreline ephemera, appearing life-like through the processes of formation and erosion - the washed up remains of ancient life forms, imaginary creatures and other story remnants - will inform a series of small scaled box-framed assemblages, and a connected investigation of miniature water coloured story on paper.

 

Embedded in the space of encounter between herself - an Irish/European settler descendent - and the physical/cultural environment of lutruwita (Tasmania), Maher’s process considers an ecological place for the self, wherein the experience of immersion and psychic unease are relationally active. It attempts to realise a 'sense of place' which is always negotiated and therefore unsettled, and it is from this position that she considers a poetics that takes account of the mutable relations between past-present and future. A depth of feeling resides in the tension produced by the consciousness of being, at once, here on stolen Palawa land, and in the ancestral land/s of her imagination....Maher’s creative engagement is intrinsically dialogic, subtle and exploratory - open to what emerges through the interaction between a growing sensitivity to natural/social ecosystems in place and the materials and processes of her making. The experience of "being" conveyed is tenuous and shifting, never fully revealing, shadowed, journeying...

 

 

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ABOUT BRUNY20

In 2018 the Bruny Island Foundation for the Arts announced a partnership with Bruny Island AU - an inspiring organisation committed to caring for the environment of Bruny Island - which generously provided the increased resources to take BRUNY20 to a new level of artist support and development.

 

The Foundation and Bruny Island AU share a vision to support and celebrate:

• Bruny Island as a space to encourage arts practice of national and international importance

• artists making a significant contribution to local, national and global arts practice

• Bruny Island as a site for exploring universal themes, particularly relating to the environment

 

As part of the Foundation's evaluation of BRUNY18, we had the opportunity to focus on expanding this vision and to explore ways to best support artists through BRUNY20.  

 

BRUNY20 is about providing opportunities for artists to develop their practice in a supportive location, conducive to exploring universal environmental themes.  The new format aims to achieve this by providing a fellowship award with a research and fieldwork component on Bruny Island. In 2020 three fellowships will be awarded, each valued at $25,000, including cash in the amount of $16,600 and accommodation to the value of $8,400.  At least one of the three artists will be Tasmanian.

 

The award is open to all artists, including visual artists, musicians, writers, performers, filmmakers,  new media and interdisciplinary artists.

 

Each of the three artists will receive four weeks of accommodation on Bruny Island between June and August 2020 for the purpose of commencing a new body of work around universal environmental themes. Following this research and fieldwork stage, each of the artists’ new work will be shown at BRUNY20 events in December 2020.

 

The award will support the artists to develop, deliver and stage a new body of work. 

 

BRUNY20 will be documented online and distributed nationally and internationally.