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Artist Statement
Together, Neve and Emma’s artistic partnership stems from common research interests surrounding death, theatre, and spiritualism. Through a shared methodology of utilising art-making to think through difficult topics, their narrative-based practices produce playful works and collaborative exhibitions.Neve
Neve is a contemporary emerging artist based in Naarm/Melbourne whose practice spans film, photography, leadlight, and object-making. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University, where she developed a practice grounded in rural gothic aesthetics, horror film traditions, and queer storytelling.
Drawing from her experiences growing up in rural Victoria, Neve's work explores themes of mortality, otherness, place, and belonging. Through handcrafted sets, low-fi filmmaking techniques, photography, stained glass, and sculptural objects, she creates imagined worlds where rural landscapes become sites of fantasy, haunting, and transformation. Victorian-era cemetery symbolism, vampirism, and B-horror aesthetics frequently appear throughout her practice, reflecting an ongoing interest in the relationship between death, memory, and queer identity.
Emma
Dancing around themes of death and futility, Emma’s collage-based practice explores the intersections of painting, ceramics, and animation. Her iterative process layers personal photographs, developmental diagrams, and a found-imagery database to create works shaped by personal narratives of anxiety and mental ill-health.
Her recent work considers the trap of using avoidance to comfort oneself when confronted with death. This series explores manifestations of anxiety that drive a paradoxical desire for control in the face of mortality, within an ongoing examination of incongruous coping behaviours as instinctive responses.
Using humour and absurdism to explore incongruous reactions to uncertainty, through medieval-inspired ceramics, nonsense diagrams, fragmented paintings and slapstick animations, her work find humour in the inevitable.
Exhibition proposal
‘No Such Luck’ explores cyclical self-fulfilling anxiety and the futile, incongruous reactions that often accompany it. This immersive, multimedia installation transforms Firstdraft’s gallery into a spinning, disorienting kaleidoscope with projections from a leadlight zoetrope. Ceramic sculptures, a hand-painted animation on a CRT TV, and oil paintings are bathed in sickly, fractured colours as rabbits dash across them, endlessly chasing and fleeing.Using imagery preceding a stereotypical jump scare - an ominous corner, a shadow, a suspicious curtain, a dead end - this exhibition investigates the counterintuitive relationship between horror movies and anxiety. As a faux death-defying experience, horror movies are a cathartic way to safely endure adrenaline-fueled survival instincts and a kind of contained panic.
Similarly, ‘No Such Luck’ explores cartoons and animation as grotesque figures distorted beyond bodily limits in repeated acts of inescapable cruelty. Unkillable, these characters are trapped as possessed ghosts, puppeteered actors in an absurd limbo between humour and horror.
A type of optical illusion, animation is brought to life by the ‘persistence of vision,’ an effect where the brain retains an image for a fraction of a second after it disappears, allowing the perception of continuous motion.
Weaving links between horror movies, superstitions, animation, optical illusions and visual games, ‘No Such Luck’ understands superstitious acts as more than hopeless attempts to control the inevitable, analysing them as counterproductive measures that further reinforce our fate.
Creating stretched silhouettes that travel around the gallery’s angular walls, the central rotating tiffany-style lamp depicts glass rabbits trapped in perpetual motion, illuminated by a globe. This work draws on the rabbit's uneasy place within folklore and rural life: a creature associated with luck and innocence, yet equally known for violence and pestilence.
This projection washes over collage-based oil paintings with layers that merge and oscilate with the changing light, revealing fragments of jump scare tropes, visual games, superstitions and optical illusions. A selection of these paintings are displayed on sculptural ceramic stands that reference the violence of the cartoon body, with stretched hands, disjointed feet and squashed feet. A hand-painted stop motion animation displayed on a CRT TV depicts an unfortunate character terrified of their own shadow.
Through ambitious experimentation that combines materials in innovative ways, we will haunt Firstdraft with ceramics, possess a lead-light zoetrope with animation, and Frankenstein painting and collage together. Building on previous collaborations and material exploration, ‘No Such Luck’ reveals instinctive reactions, subconscious patterns of anxiety and the mirage of control.
Support Material
Images
Video work
CVs
Neve Curnow
Emma Lyn Winkler
Timeline
MONTH 1: Research and Development
- Deepen research into horror tropes, optical illusions, visual games, etc.
- Source and collect materials for experimentation
- Plan and sketch initial ideas for each medium and multimedia combinations
MONTH 2: Material Experimentation
- Conduct small-scale multimedia and zoetrope experiments
- Document tests and refine
- Develop detailed storyboard for stop-motion animation
MONTH 3: Drafts and Tests
- Create detailed plans for final hybrid works and zoetrope
- Build props and set elements for stop-motion video
- Test interactions between physical works and moving image (projections, shadowplay)
- Create digital animation draft
- Finalise script and animation tests
- Seek feedback - invite friends and mentors to studio space
MONTHS 4–5: Major Production Phase
Video work:
- Animate stop-motion
- Shoot live-action elements
- Edit footage
Multimedia works:
- Construct full-scale hybrid works and zoetrope
- Integrate video projections and any other exterior elements
MONTH 6: Refining and Installation Testing
- Final video editing and sound design
- Final refinements to sculptural and multimedia works
- Test installation: lighting, AV integration, interactivity, zoetrope mechanism
- Photography and documentation of finished works
