Welcome to
Body As Archive - me, memory and landscape
Alison Shirley’s Honours Major Project presentation 2020
Firstly I would like to acknowledge that the following creative project was conceived and created on the unceded land of the Dja Dja Wurung people of the Kulin Nation.
I would like to pay my respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge their custodianship and connection to land, waters and community, throughout Australia.
Body As Archive - me, memory and landscape presents a collection of my works focussed on embodiment and memory - how we hold our histories and our stories in our bodies. The work explores the patterns, perspectives and landscape of memory and its elusive nature.
Choreography and photography have together provided creative tropes for exploring the ways in which memory occurs in the body, as a web-like pattern which spreads across our sensory systems. These patterns are constantly adapting and changing, depending on new information from our current experiences and beliefs. They are constantly on the move. As I move, so do they. As my perspective changes memory too, shifts to adapt. These patterns are reflected back at me in nature through moving patterns in water and the markings on trees that indicate heritage, life experience and injury. I improvise to experience and collect information in my body. I capture with my camera for another perspective again - and to aid my memory and experience of this place, as sight is one of my favoured sensors and memory can be slippery.
My camera captures the dance I see in nature, choreographing with each frame. My body captures the dance it understands through its history and story and memory and place. Together we fill the spaces created by an absence of other dancers. Where I would learn and create from observing bodies moving in space and place, my imagery has partnered me for this year’s choreography.
These creations are my response to the new world that 2020 has presented, while considering my themes and concepts. Please enjoy.
Art book ARCHIVAL
Art book
As part of Alison’s Major Project outcome, she created and self-published an art book, including poetry and photographs which formed a large part of her artistic research practice as well as the imagery for her dance films.
ARCHIVAL, the short dance film
Film: Archival
Archival is one of two short films Alison made and presented as part of her Major Project outcome for Honours in Dance, 2020. This film explores the ways in which the body holds memories, place and emotions, creating and re-creating our stories and histories as they intertwine with our current experiences.
Beauty In Decay, the short dance film
Film: Beauty In Decay
Beauty In Decay is the second of two short dance films made and presented by Alison as part of her Major Project artist response. Issues of confinement and restriction make their mark on this work, including ideas around nature’s impact on the human body and human as nature.
Archival - Art Book
Photography is always a tool for me in any creative project, whether it be at the centre of the work, or more of a companion. In this year’s Major Project for Honours, it took more of a front seat than I had anticipated, driven forward as human contact and close physical participation disappeared in the rear view. The image-collecting began as a way to notice and observe ancestry - the way trees show their family heritage with particular traits. It grew to encompass other elements, such as water and its ever changing form. Here there were other kinds of patterns, ones that appeared and disappeared and reshaped constantly with the movement of water. The landscape was showing me another way to see embodiment, with patterns repeating but also shifting a little every time, just as memory itself behaves. I found the same dance of life and embodiment could be told through the elements, patterns and perspectives I found in the natural world around me - and the closer I looked, the more I could find new ways of seeing.
PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR EXAMPLES OF THAT JOURNEY AS AN ART BOOK.
TO PURCHASE A LIMITED EDITION PRINTED ART BOOK, PLEASE VISIT HERE
BEAUTY IN DECAY - a teaser of Alison Shirley’s self-published book ARCHIVAL.
Enjoy photography and poetry together in this art book by Alison Shirley. Purchase your copy HERE
SKINS, the bark of trees showing colour, texture and markings of life experience.
Purchase your copy of Alison Shirley’s book ARCHIVAL HERE
Archival
Our bodies and our environments hold stories and histories encapsulating a vast array of experiences and impressions. When I came across this site, I knew from afar, that it would be magical to be near. I felt like it was inviting me in from those silvery treetops. My body knew it would invoke my past, my childhood of adventures in natural landscapes. I had to visit. Sometimes when we dive in, the water feels different from what we expect.
Beauty In Decay
When faced with confinement and conditions that change your work, there are new questions that accompany new approaches. I am confined to a new set of rules, a new landscape. What is my body ready to say when I have not been here before? Is anything certain - besides decline and decay? Searching for patterns and perspective in this new landscape has meant wading through layers and layers of knowing and looking at truths that I might rather avoid, but here I am - it’s the layers within me that I am unfolding.
