News

Recent articles on Marginalia (by Gracia) alongside news and exhibitions.

From Swans to Yellow-fronted woodpeckers

June 27, 2013 Gracia Louise

Recently landed: From Swans to Yellow-fronted woodpeckers, a new post on Elsewhere (by Louise) sees the winged and feathered theme continue

Louise Jennison, A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, 2013, artists' book

Last week, we nestled within and grew into the eternal undergrowth of an ancient forest in Lithuania (‘The Ancient Woods’). Last night, in the State Theatre, we found we were still in the abundant wilderness. Unbound, full of joy, accompanied once more by the music of bird song and rustle of leaves underfoot and overhead. A part of the narrative, body and soul, thanks to William Forsythe’s ‘A Quiet Evening of Dance’ in two acts (@sadlers_wells, @melbfestival). Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala Gomez were resplendent birds with their arms encased in long gloves, their hands grew like feathers. Magpies or Blue-footed boobies, or some other bird yet known. The soundscape was one of bird song, and breath expelled from the body in playful whooshes, chirrups, and peeps. The dark forest floor teemed with life, even at its most quiet. The sound of a wing sliding into a pocket, or a tail sweeping the floor, the quiet hum was exhilarating. And when later accompanied by Rameau’s Hippolyte & Aricie: Ritournelle (from ‘Une Symphonie Imaginaire’), in Seventeen/Twenty One, the dancers upon pipes for legs to their wings for arms became the embodiment of the composer’s “language of the heart”. The power of music and dance, felt in our bird hide, as their movements swelled to fluidity. A dance lesson, a nature study, a building of a composition upon the canvas, layering colour and blending tone, noting how movement is accentuated through colour placement. Travelling through the body, a conversation between an extended hand twirling to a planted foot. Fading in and out, a fluttering conversation between all the dancers. Thank-you Brigel Gjoka, Jill Johnson, Christopher Roman, Riley Watts (@eberginger), and Rauf ‘RubberLegz’ Yasit (@rubberlegz) for uplifting us so. Thank-you for allowing us to remain in the forest. Thank-you for the chance for all five of the senses to be fed through ballet, William Forsythe. Sustaining us, still, that light, strength, and beauty. 🧤(‘A Quiet Evening of Dance’ image credit: Bill Cooper, Tristram Kenton)
#ballet
#dance
#baroque
#melbfest
#birdsong
#WilliamForsythe
#AQuietEveningofDance

Sunday class, with a full pick of the mats, but still I went to my favourite spot (just out of frame). (@barrebody, Fitzroy)
#barre
#studio
#pattern
#barrebody
#thisissunday

Extending the vocabulary of dance with my coloured socks and long gloves on, ‘A Quiet Evening of Dance’, a suite of William Forsythe’s recent work, @melbfestival, calls us to the theatre, and already I can hear Jean-Philippe Rameau and birdsong. At last. Our turn. “I like to make uncertain what takes place on stage and to extend what I call the poetry of disappearance.”
— #WilliamForsythe 🧤 (Image credit: Rauf Yasit and Parvaneh Scharafali in ‘Seventeen Twenty One’; photography: Bill Cooper)

#ballet
#dance
#melbfest
#Forsythe
#thisissaturday
#AQuietEveningofDance

Like a wide-eyed Louise Wain drawing, our new foster cat, Pretzel. We’ve already discovered his love of chin rubs and head boops. (Image credit: #LouisWain; “He made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world.” — H.G. Wells)
#cats
#RSPCA
#fostercare
#thisissaturday
#catsofinstagram

Friday. Running. Flying. Buoyant. To join the circus. A proposition, too good to refuse. And I’ve a brolly in my bag o’ tricks. Just in case. Just in case I need to fill a branch of flight or a vocabulary of movement. To ‘Lexicon’. A dictionary in the gardens, the Royal Botanic Gardens. "The creak of tensing muscles, the gasp of breath expelled, the hiss of a limb whipping through the air and the slap of skin connecting” awaits. Drift on, NoFit State Circus. Bring your finest physical poetry. (Image credit: ‘Lexicon’, Melbourne Festival, @melbfestival)
#circus
#Lexicon
#melbfest
#thisisfriday
#MelbourneFestival

Panthera leo. C 38142. From the collection of @museumsvictoria. “This female was raised in captivity at Werribee Open Range Zoo and donated to the museum shortly after her death in 2009”. She now has a home in painted ruins, within a lenticular, and will be a part of our exhibition, ‘Ripples in the Open’. #lion
#nature
#lenticular
#specimen
#Pantheraleo
#inthemuseum
#RipplesintheOpen

The mountains in the distance, and the sky up above, the last pieces to transform. (Last night’s last steps. ‘Ripples in the Open’, opening 10th of November, at Realm.)
#collage
#upclose
#faraway
#screenshot
#screengrab
#RipplesintheOpen

We stepped out of one landscape and into another. Today, we delivered our 15 metre collage to the printers, all 20.5 GB of it, and explored the library of Parliament House on a tour.
#tiles
#landscape
#underfoot
#lookdown
#VictorianTiles
#RipplesintheOpen
#ParliamentHouseVictoria

Today, we collected an alert Long-nosed potoroo (Potorous tridactylus) from the printers, and a timid foster cat by the name of Pretzel from the #RSPCA, and we can report that both animals are settling into their new digs well.
#WIP
#collage
#fostercare
#goodnews
#RipplesintheOpen
#longnosedpotoroo

Tomorrow, we collect Pretzel, a timid two-year-old tabby from the RSPCA. We’ll be fostering him until he is more comfortable around humans. It has been too long since we last fostered, and the world seems so upside down. Here’s to righting a piece of it, one purr at a time. (Image credit: Joanna Martha Reeves, 'A garden party (taken from life)’, 1896, gelatine silver print, 99 x 140 mm.
This image is part of the Canadian Copyright Collection held by the British Library, and has been digitised as part of the Picturing Canada project. It was deposited with copyright number 8754, and is indexed with Dalhousie number 29.) 💕
#cats
#RSPCA
#fostercare
#inthelibrary
#catsofinstagram

How does your collage grow?
With silver scales and stormy skies
And pretty scallops all in a row.
#WIP
#scales
#pattern
#scallops
#fanshape
#RipplesintheOpen

When the things outside mirror the things inside: a mountain of petals, in the park and on the screen. And a Musky rat-kangaroo (Hypsiprymnodon moschatus), too, if you squint.
(Hypsiprymnodon moschatus, mount. Registration no. C 6787. Photographed by Heath Warwick, in the #collection of Museums Victoria.)
#onfoot
#postyoga
#specimens
#thisisspring
#RipplesintheOpen
#Muskyratkangaroo

Scratching with a badger, curled with a mouse, today in ‘The Ancient Woods’, everything we sought, found. And now it is back to our own woods upon the screen. No fauna to come, but there will be a sky to this different kind of ancient. As we continue to work on our giant collage for ‘Ripples in the Open’, we carry the small paw scurrying and quick wing beats of the film with us, and we find we’ve soil under our fingernails. 🐌
(Film stills from ‘The Ancient Woods’, Mindaugas Surveil, 2017; screened as part of the Environmental Film Festival Australia. “Filmed in one of the last remaining patches of old growth #forest in #Lithuania, ‘The Ancient Woods’ is a place where the boundaries of time melt and everything that exists does not wither or age but “grows into” eternity. A #poetic and atypical nature film takes its viewers on the endless journey — from the #forest thickets to the wolves’ caves and up to black stork’s nest, and then deep into the water to the #underwater forest, returning after to the human beings inhabiting the edge of the woodland".) 🐺
#WIP
#poem
#nature
#collage
#EFFA2018
#RipplesintheOpen
#TheAncientWoods

“Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. ‘A culture’, he wrote warningly in 1953, ‘is no better than its woods’.”
— Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Wild Places’

To ‘The Ancient Woods’ (2017), a nature film directed by Mindaugas Survila (Lithuania), “narrated by the sounds of the woods; rustling winds, bird calls, river currents and creaking trees”, screening as part of the Environmental Film Festival Australia (@envirofilmfest), at ACMI.

Shh.

#trees
#nature
#memory
#EFFA2018
#thisissunday
#TheAncientWoods

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