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 West Space into a haunted cemetery that addresses anxiety, death and sexuality through Victorian symbolism and spiritualism.
Neve's practice fuses film, photography, leadlight, and object-making to explore Gothic aesthetics and tropes within a rural context. Her art combines escapist fantasies with the realities of queer existence in rural Australia, inviting viewers into a realm of gothified sheep farms, hot monsters, and B-horror aesthetics.
Emma’s work questions how to deal with dying as the ultimate, inevitable unknown. Emma’s personal yet playful practice finds intersections of collage, painting and animation. Through layered paintings and slapstick stop-motion animations, Emma encourages viewers to laugh in the face of death, or at least have a conversation about it.
Neve’s investigation stems from the haunting feeling of being eternally tied to land rooted in colonial and personal histories. Through rural gothic—a genre expressing anxieties about sexuality and death—Neve's work brings together 19th-century graveyard symbolism, video work, and handcrafted gravestones. Emma will examine Victorian fascination with the supernatural, a response to rapid technological development and a sense of precarity, and contemporary avoidance of death to consider our complex relationship with mortality. Using euphemisms and superstitions like 'dirt nap' and 'knock on wood,' her work frames these behaviours as manifestations of anxiety.
‘What Remains’ brings together common interests surrounding death, theatre, and fantasy through a shared methodology of utilising art-making to think through confronting topics. The project will dictate our methods of collaboration, whether coproduction, collectively frankensteining different mediums or something else entirely.
Our project will be a meaningful experience for us both, marking the beginning of a collaborative relationship after years of working in parallel. This program offers a chance to push the boundaries of our approaches, merging our distinct practices with West Space’s guidance. Conceiving this exhibition will refine our skills in application writing, numerous mediums and installation, offering insights that will enhance future projects. Through learning, dialogue and exchange, this opportunity will connect our art and research into a cohesive vision while building connections at West Space, Collingwood Yards and Melbourne’s broader art community.
Developing ‘What Remains’ will radically accelerate our artistic development by realising ambitious ideas in an extensive, supported program that facilitates rigorous research and experimentation, culminating in an innovative installation that opens our work to a wide audience. We’ve recently taught ourselves new mediums - animation, ceramics and prop-making - and will use this program to further expand and challenge our practices. Now is the critical time for ‘What Remains’ which uses a unique combination of humour and sincerity to encourage discourse on personal anxieties through a framework of historical and contemporary research at a pivotal moment in our careers.
Through 'What Remains,' Neve and Emma will draw parallels between the Victorian era and present to explore the connection between anxiety and death, using absurdism and camp to approach dying, sexuality and art a bit less seriously.
Images
Images
Video Work
CVs
Neve Curnow
Emma Lyn Winkler
