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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.
Support Material
Previous work
Video work
Indicative Images
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
