A Matter Of Time : IN | ARI Symposium

A full day of creative inquiry, activity, and discussion around concepts and applications of ‘time’ explored in artistic practice. Topics include: relational structures for thriving in uncertain futures, cyclical archives, continuity and cultural practices, domestic time signatures, notions of the inevitable, duration's ability to warp perception, patience in precarious landscapes, and more.
10am - 12pm | Merinda Davies | The Future Is...Workshop
12pm - 6pm | Libby Harward, Katie Harris-Macleod, Kellie O'Dempsey | Exhibition
1pm | Amanda Bennetts and Ash Musk | In-Conversation: The Body In Time
1.50pm | Fin Wegner and Michael Norris | In-Conversation: Time Is The Medium of Sound
2.30pm | Ash Musk | Performance: present moment collapse
3.30pm - 6pm | Open Discussions
10am - 12pm | Merinda Davies | The Future Is...Workshop
What kind of relational structures do we need to thrive in our current and future shifting landscapes? Join artist Merinda Davies in a process of world-building – listening with, writing with, moving with and thinking with; the environment inside and outside IN | ARI.

This workshop will invite intimate encounters with humans and other beings. Mapping our bodies and ecological entanglements with the site. This workshop may include movement, writing, drawing, listening, smelling, touching. Everyone is invited, everything is optional, no experience in dance/writing/drawing etc is required.
Re-orienting our perspective towards interspecies thinking, we will recreate a collective map of the site. Speculating an alternative dream-scape through conversation, mapping and hands-on making to dig into questions of intimacy and connection with humans and other beings as we face an uncertain future.
12pm - 6pm | Libby Harward, Katie Harris-Macleod, Kellie O'Dempsey
Libby Harward
Reiteration of deadstream_TV Episode 8
Libby Harward accompanied by Joseph Burgess
Segments from a LIVE stream video - Part of the Dabilbung Series 2023
A sound performance in response to using an archaeological sieve and a 44-gallon drum fitted with an “irrigation sound system”, amplifying instruments of occupation, classification, extraction, and greed. Hear the sound of having to sieve ourselves through the mechanisms of ongoing colonisation to prove our existence under the oppression of foreign law. Interjections made by the harsh metallic clanking of star pickets, banged together in the artist’s hands like contemporary clapsticks. Cyclical time is present within materials of occupation reclaimed, in a performance of sovereignty and resistance. Honouring the continuity of cultural practices and memories and them as active elements in today’s and tomorrow’s world, reinforcing that these traditions and struggles are ongoing rather than relics of the past.
Katie Harris-Macleod
Falling through space is a series of biomorphic artworks that speak to a specific experience in which a memory so complex and disturbing resurfaced in a conversation, that it activated a dream-like state in which MacLeod witnessed the hallucinatory metamorphosis of this memory. Her body in motion, adrift, lost, floating and falling through time and space.
Fragmented memories trapped within her body, held tightly to protect her truth, over time have manifested as chronic pain, inflammation and illness. Falling through space is a series of works that explore the notion of letting go and trusting that her body will too; knowing that she is safe to do so.
Through somatic drawing and making practices, MacLeod now transcribes these visions into tangible places of wonder, enchantment and strangeness.
Kellie O'Dempsey
Giving shape to the memory and experience of the liminal space between dying and death Bathroom Scene is a two-channel video installation. In tending to someone at the threshold of life, O’Dempsey became the caretaker not only of a fading presence but also of the objects, boxes and memories infused into the place of care. This work uses a specific location to navigate the fragile intersection of intimacy, exhaustion, and the quiet tedium that inhabits this temporal space—where the inevitability of mortality is confronted through the lens of a parent’s passing.
Using performance and video, Bathroom Scene transforms the act of care into a monotonous loop. Drawing on performance and video, O’Dempsey ritualises care and nurtures relationality to quietly honour women’s unseen labour and question the value of care in a society that values capital.
1.50pm | Fin Wegener and Michael Norris | In-Conversation: Time Is The Medium of Sound
In this conversation, two experimental sound artists Michael Norris and Finley Wegener discuss Time’s influence on their practices and duration’s mighty ability to warp perception. As two artists deeply concerned with environments, ecology, and the physical characteristics of vibration in matter and space, Norris and Wegener are well-positioned to spearhead this discussion into the temporal. The two will explore both compositional and performative applications of data sonification, psychoacoustics, and manipulations of timescales, highlighting techniques and learning experiences gained through their experimental practices. From how underground seismic vibrations can be accelerated into human-hearing range, to how static oscillations reveal sonic subtlety over time, duration and temporality gives rise to esoteric and surprising topics - this collaborative discussion is well suited to those interested in creative explorations of biology, mathematics and the immersive nature of the sonic experience.
2.30pm | Ash Musk | Performance: present moment collapse
A woman co-exists within a forest of plastic columns, experimenting with gentle but persistent acts to transform her body and its relationship to the surroundings. Attempting to understand this unyeilding, plastic material gives way to unintended and unavoidable consequences.

Patience is required while existing within this precarious landscape.

present moment collapse is an express, solo version of its longer parent work (From Infancy, 2021) reimagined for the A Matter of Time Symposium and IN | ARI. The work forms part of ongoing research into the conflict between the natural and built environments we inhabit, and how our bodies are situated / complicit / ingrained within this complex relationship. Taking its original inspiration from ideas of terraforming - the transformation of hostile environments - the female performer attempts to prioritise softness, slowness and tenderness in order to mould, change, wrestle and alter her body to fit inside, around and within these unpredictable, uncompromising and instable objects. Her feminine form magnifies the phallic existence of these objects, the aliveness of her body in direct contrast to the material, outnumbered but persistent.

The work has its own pace, one which requires exceptional perseverance and confidence. The present moment veers and swerves, but is never permanent and always collapsing.

The IN | SITE 2024 Destabilise Program is supported through the Creative Industries Investment Program and is jointly funded by Sunshine Coast Council Arts and Heritage Levy and the Regional Arts Development Fund in partnership with the Queensland Government @artsqueensland@sunshinecoastcouncil @artscoast

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Old Lock Up, 4 First Avenue, Maroochydore, Australia