Melody Woodnutt
:CELESTIAL BODIES
FATA MORGANA, 2023, Street Projection
DEATH SHROUD FOR A SHIP, 2023,
Film + Installation
Two new works by Melody Woodnutt include a streetside projection on Gertrude Street alongside an installation work of expanded cinema within the Mission to Seafarers Norla Dome called, Fata Morgana and Death Shroud for a Ship, respectively. These works sit within a new series called Celestial Bodies which tie together the sea and the cosmos as vast bodies that sit above and below an ascending yet sinking ship. It is a poetic attempt to embrace glittering spectral bodies; at once our own and all else born of dead stars. Created as haunting silvery vessels of sound, 16mm expanded cinema, strobe, fog, a death shroud, and digital projection. Celestial Bodies An ascension and sinking, swells conjured between the divine and the dark. The Two together apart are a Sisyphean attempt bigger than your house, to posthumously finish building a 55 foot skeleton, a boat frame. Here, Fata Morgana breathes. Due diction, a spectral fiction starts in a ship's absence and ruin. Atmospheres and celestial bodies never touch the sea, but they swallow the vessel.
GSPF Location:
110 Gertrude St, Fitzroy (FATA MORGANA)
6PM - 12AM
(DEATH SHROUD FOR A SHIP)
Installation Location:
717 Flinders St, Docklands
12PM - 8PM
Artist Bio
Melody Woodnutt is a contemporary artist working within the expanded field of 16mm analogue moving image film. Woodnutt's works take the form of kinetic or immersive installations, still images, and short films that function as portals or 'topias to distil broader societal complexities into quasi-fictional worlds and allegories.
Through a poetic mode and romantic conceptualism, Woodnutt utilises imagery and objects that relate to time, emotion, nature-culture symbiosis, hauntology, and cinema: artworks then come together as bricolage world-making through expanded cinema practices. With a deep pull towards unknowable realms such as the sea, cosmos, and spectral worlds, Woodnutt drenches artworks in atmospheres.
During the residency, Woodnutt aims to develop an understanding of Sky Country, astronomy, and navigational knowledge found in the stars. She hopes to utilise this learning in an attempt to finish building her late grandfather’s unfinished boat frame out of
expanded cinema and toward a spectral fiction.