About Iris & Beccy’s Residency
We are utilising LGI’s Make a Start residency at WXYZ Studios to begin the first development of Love of my Life, which explores the denial of death, mortality, and queer death theory. In this experimental work, we are informed by our relationship and combine our independent skills and practices as dancer/choreographer and textile designer.
Love of my Life is a ritual intended to assuage the anxiety associated with the fear of dying alone. Informed by burial traditions, rituals, and handling of remains across time and cultures, this development carves out a space for human connection and an anxiety surrounding death. We plan on using our time to experiment with ‘dying together’, attempting to immortalise our connection through ritual actions involving dressing and undressing.
This residency is an exciting opportunity for us to develop our collaborative artistic practice, as while we have both worked on each other’s projects before, this is our first joint work. We are thinking expansively about this project at the moment; our aims are to enter another development and create a public outcome in the form of performance, film, and/or mixed media. We’d like to thank the LGI team for supporting the beginning of this project, and to the artists who have provided feedback on the development’s early stages.
– Iris Elgar & Beccy Clarke
Artist Bios
Iris Elgar is a queer dance artist living and working on Wurundjeri land, in Melbourne. They are invested in exploring performer-audience relationships, and within that, queerness, theatricality, tenderness, and introspection. Iris graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) in 2022, and they were a recipient of the Phillip Adams BalletLab VCA Mentorship Award. They have performed in works by Lucy Guerin, Daniel Riley & Brianna Kell, Zoë Bastin, Ngioka Bunda-Heath, Tristan Carter & Dylan Tedaldi, and Gregory Lorenzutti, and are continuing to expand their own choreographic practice.
Beccy Clarke is a recently graduated textile artist interested in wearable sculpture, the relationship between performance and garment, handcraft, and knitwear. Inspired by the natural world, her practice often utilises the mermaid as a queer and feminist symbol, and is linked to themes of transformation and worldbuilding. In 2023 she completed her Bachelor of Textiles (Design)(Honours) thesis, Embedded Movement in Garments: How textiles dictate movement and identity in performance. After having studied dance from a designer’s perspective, she is taking her first steps to explore performance art with her partner, Iris.