Proposal

Leave Now! Run bitch! You’ve gotta leave the graveyard!

Arising from a collaboration between emerging artists, 'What Remains's' immersive multimedia installation will transform a gallery at Tuggeranong Arts Centre into a haunted cemetery that addresses anxiety, death and sexuality through Victorian symbolism and spiritualism. This ambitious, experimental project combines ceramics, video, painting, stop-motion animation, led-light and props into a thought-provoking exhibition that makes confronting topics more accessible through humour and absurdism.

‘What Remains’ brings together common research interests surrounding death, theatre, and fantasy within our narrative-based practices through a shared methodology of utilising art-making to think through difficult topics.

Neve’s work explores mortality, death, and the sense of being tethered to a place, all through a rural gothic lens. Inspired by the graveyards Neve has roamed since childhood, where familiar family names repeat through generations, Neve investigates the haunting feeling of being eternally tied to land steeped in colonial and personal histories. Through rural gothic—a genre expressing anxieties about sexuality and death—Neve creates a fantasy world for escape and confrontation. Victorian-era graveyard symbolism, video work, and handcrafted gravestones and fences evoke the eerie beauty and oppressive atmosphere of these spaces, transforming darkness into a magical, haunting narrative.

Emma’s work examines Victorian fascination with the supernatural and contemporary avoidance of death to consider our complex relationship with mortality. Using euphemisms and superstitions like 'dirt nap' and 'knock on wood,' alongside mediaeval fool and trickster archetypes, her animations and paintings frame these habits as manifestations of anxiety. Rather than shying away from death, Emma’s absurd, playful works explore how reframing dying could be an antidote to anxiety.

The gallery will be transformed into an immersive rural graveyard scene, with hand-crafted gravestones and wrought-iron fences inspired by local graveyards and Victorian-era symbolism. A fog machine enhances the eerie atmosphere, enveloping the space in a gothic veil. Looping video works play from two CRT TVs. Neve’s horror film blends rural landscapes with fantastical elements, drawing viewers into a haunting yet strangely familiar world, pulling from the artist’s personal history and the collective memory of rural life. This film is accompanied by ambient sound, punctuated by cartoon sound effects from Emma’s absurd animation. Small-scale oil paintings hang on the wall and a large-scale, collage-based work on unstretched canvas is suspended sculpturally from a raw steel frame in the gallery’s centre. Through this metal frame and the wrought-iron fences, our installation responds to the gallery’s industrial history materially while also considering the limited wall space.

‘What Remains’s’ experimental, site-responsive installation of new work developed for TAC uses 19th-century symbolism and spiritualism to explore the connection between anxiety and death. Drawing parallels between the Victorian era and the present, together Neve and Emma use absurdism and camp to approach death, sexuality and art a bit less seriously.

Community Engagement

Please note: we will supply tripods and art materials and the workshop can be held in the gallery

We would like to propose a stop-motion animation workshop, using basic art supplies and a free smartphone app to demonstrate the accessibility and expressive potential of animation. This program will engage the local community in a fun, inclusive workshop that encourages the use of animation as a creative outlet.

The workshop will begin with an overview of the fundamentals of animation and an initial warm-up exercise. The majority of the session will be dedicated to creating a short, looping animation, individually or in small groups. This animation will be created using collage, paper cutouts, drawing, plasticine, lego and/or painting to make animation an accessible and immediate medium for all preferences and levels of experience. This workshop will use participants’ smart device cameras and the free software, ‘Stop Motion’, available for both Apple and Android devices.

Although the animation overview will focus on cartoon visual language, humour and narrative, participants will be free to make whatever work they desire, from figurative to abstract. Participants will be encouraged to immerse themselves in the process of animating and the tactility of their chosen materials through play and experimentation. This will facilitate a mindful approach, tapping into the subconscious to develop creative and expressive animations.