Artists in Residence
2018 and 2019
2019
Arts Residencies
Australian trumpet player and composer Sam Nester has built a diverse career as a performer and educator. Based in New York, Sam serves on faculty at The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, as well as being the Artistic Director and trumpeter of Bridge Arts Ensemble. Nester has performed for Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, Paris Opera Ballet, Wordless Music Orchestra and Brooklyn Orchestra, among many others.
The recipient of numerous awards, Sam has been a Fulbright Scholar, an Australian Music Foundation Award recipient, Brian Boak Outstanding Performer, and an American Australian Association’s Dame Joan Sutherland Fund grantee. The composer and sound designer of countless audio installations, Nester’s work has been heard throughout the USA. His generative audio installations have been featured at the Manhattan School of Music, the Rhode Island School of Design, Mise-en Place and TEMP Art Space in New York.
During the course of the residency in June and July 2019, Sam engaged in a substantial recording and musical composition project. Capturing interviews and oral histories of longtime Bruny Island residents was a focus of inspiration and will be weaved into instrumental compositions that incorporate improvisation and generative composition practices. Additionally, Sam plans to use these interviews and oral histories to create an interactive sound installation that employs natural field recordings to capture and utilise Bruny’s unique environmental elements. The culmination of this project will be a vast artistic audio image of Bruny Island and Sam's experiences while in residency.
Upon returning to New York, Sam will have a final product that exists in two distinct forms. The first will be a series of recorded audio tracks that will be finalised and released online – this material will also be traditionally scored and available for future live performance. The second will be an interactive audio installation incorporating live instrumental music, field recordings and electronics developed on MAX/MSP and Ableton Live.
BRUNY ISLAND RESIDENCY
SAM NESTER
Helen Hyatt-Johnston and Brad Buckley undertook a joint residency during July 2019 - as an artist couple - with individual practices that will respond to the Bruny Island Lighthouse and site.
Helen is a visual artist; one half of the collaborative duo The Twilight Girls; and a writer, list maker, collector, and occasional curator. Helen’s practice over the last twenty years has included performance, installation and video works that explores solitude, reflection, space and architecture. As part of The Twilight Girls she has also made a number of works that reconsider and reinterpret how women are presented and represented in popular culture, cliché, myth and society. Helen will be writing about the Bruny Island residency at the lighthouse and will develop several performances.
Brad is an artist, activist, urbanist and is a Professorial Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, the University of Melbourne. He was previously, Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. Brad has a thirty-year history of working with ideas that explore markers or boundaries, whether these be social, cultural, political or created through geography. He used the opportunity that the residency offers to undertake research into the history of the Bruny Island Lighthouse, and more generally, the micro societies that were created when lighthouses were established along the Eastern seaboard.
CAPE BRUNY RESIDENCY
HELEN HYATT-JOHNSTON
BRAD BUCKLEY
BRUNY ISLAND RESIDENCY
JENNIFER MILLS
2018
Arts Residencies
The Bruny Island Residency 2018 was awarded to writer Jennifer Mills. This residency is an initiative of the Foundation for projects that have a focus on Bruny Island. It is supported by the Foundation and members of the Bruny Island community.
Jennifer Mills is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and deals with climate change and our perceptions of time. In 2012 she was named a Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald and in 2014 she was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. She is presently working on a collection of essays.
While in residence at Adventure Bay, Mills developed an essay about the impact of tourism on Bruny Island and the ways in which changing patterns of human usage can affect perceptions of place. Mills is a keen hiker and paid particular attention to the evolution of trails, paths and maps, and examined the impact of walking on the island. She also taught a short story workshop for interested residents. Mills lives in regional South Australia.
CAPE BRUNY RESIDENCY
KYLE HEDRICK
The 2018 Cape Bruny Residency, a partnership between the Bruny Island Foundation for the Arts and Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, was awarded to film maker Kyle Hedrick.
Kyle was resident at the Lighthouse Keepers Quarters during the month of June 2018 for four weeks. He researched and wrote a new feature film script, set on Bruny Island.
During his residency Kyle also produced an evocative short film that featured two Bruny Islanders (which can be viewed by making a request to the Foundation via email).
Kyle is a Director, Writer, Editor and Composer. He recently completed a Master of Screen Arts (Directing) at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He has worked on 'The Kettering Incident', and has made his first feature film, Into the Waves, set in Tasmania.
Kyle says, “as a filmmaker who grew up in Southern Tasmania, I am committed to engaging with local Tasmanian creatives with the goal of sharing Tasmanian stories with national and international audiences”.