Broadcast/Immacolata Reflection
This residency was a period of further development for a solo project begun in April 2025, titled ‘Dare’, and then, ‘Bear’. Over the latter part of 2025, ‘Bear’ became ‘Broadcast’. Then, across this Moving Forward residency, ‘Broadcast’ became ‘Immacolata’. In keeping with the fluid title, the work has morphed and shifted according to the conditions within which it was forged.
I started this project with a desire to create something without a thematic underpinning - to create from form, and from my body’s moving language. As such, it was unfunded, with no milestones or external obligations beyond a personal commitment to turn up and undertake the work on a part-time basis. This was harder than expected, as so much of my work as an artist in a professionalised sector is shaped by the contours and conventions of institutions, e.g. residencies, showings, contracts and outcomes.
I have long been interested in the spectrum between form and content, and often felt that my formal interests and intuitive choices had to be smuggled in the back door, or shoe-horned into a funding and programming structure that wants the tagline before the practice has even begun. With this process, I was able to allow the thematics to unfold as they may, alongside a turbulent personal journey of death, grief, effort, stasis, uncertainty and more - all of which have coloured the eventuating piece.
This two-week residency was the most concentrated period that I have undertaken on the project so far, and the first this year. It culminated in a showing and discussion - an event which I am still ruminating on. How can I see what this work is when it has been becoming for such a long time?
The ‘Immacolata’ of the title is partly in reference to the magic of something arising from divine forces - something coming from nothing. It is the ‘nothing’ that interests me, including the nothing of the moving body without context, theme or relation, trying to create something whole from only the materiality of itself. I’m curious about the erasure that happens when we elevate the magic and mystery of a creation, neglecting the space of uncertainty, ambiguity and purgatory that is the hallmark of artistic process and consciousness. The labour of ‘nothing’ in this instance is germination, repetition, growth, loss, renewal and repeated cycles.
My experiences in the past year have been characterised by living within a space of indeterminism. With infertility, the cause and effect relationship - a divine law that we somehow uphold even as we are continually proven mistaken, is obliterated. You desire and take steps toward an outcome, but without agency or resolution. Advice and guidelines come thick and fast and very soon turn to dust around your head - a fog that becomes a permanent mist, separating you from the moving world.
‘Just trust’, ‘believe’ and ‘it comes when you least expect it’ are cliches that mark a human tendency to orient toward the mystical and the wishful, to fly above the inconvenient pragmatic dimensions of unproductive labouring that negate faith, and cannot be explained away, except with resolution. With an endpoint comes the relief of elucidation: ‘it was all worth it’, or ‘perhaps it was not meant to be’, as though a binary has become apparent - it’s either ‘there’ or ‘not there’. So, where does all the living go? It is buried - even while we are living it.
The clothes of my partner and I steadily pile up onto a chair in the corner of my room. Half-worn, semi-structured and rumpled, they obscure any semblance of formal clarity. I sit and look at it, and impulsively draw shapes - crossing over one another, around again, looping back, no end point, no rest for the pencil. I painstakingly colour in all the little misshapen teardrops, circles and triangles that I can identify, dropping in water to wash the colour around. Thus delineated, they assemble into grotesque and ungainly tumors - born out of the chair itself.
My partner and I called this chair Immacolata after the mother of the protagonist in the novel ‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante. Last year, we watched the miniseries, and were struck by a scene in which Immacolata visits Elena in the middle of the night while she is at university. Sick and feverish, she awakes in the night to a vision of a dark outline sitting on a chair in the corner - a lumpen figure that was not there before she fell asleep. She wonders if she’s dreaming.
Our Immacolata is the subject of three paintings I completed earlier this year, and displayed on the back wall of the LGI studio for the showing. In the work, this atmosphere of dreaming, fog, and the buried living, manifests in a palpable thickness that was remarked upon by the showing audience. In the movement, stillness and rhythmic convolutions are similarly delineated - with a suspended quality emerging that makes one wonder when it will rupture. I don’t know if it can or will. I am still waiting to understand what the last chapter in the work will be. Something has been completed, but I’m not sure what happens next.
I am drawn to the extremes. It is perhaps something like a new form entirely - a more straightforward story - perhaps. Or a scrubbing away - a scribbling over - a smudging - a breaking down and dispersal, that resonates. But how to disperse the body? This past year has been littered with dispersal - and nowhere for it to rest. Many times, images of brittle eggs and embryos crumbling to dust have entered my mindscape while making this piece. Once, a bird swooped my head three times in succession, pecking my cap (luckily I was wearing a cap and sunglasses) as I walked home from work. When I got home, I received a phone call that told me three embryos had not survived. The poetic simplicity of this seemingly fated moment haunted me, even after I thought I had learned that nothing means anything in this endeavour - that something may follow nothing, and nothing can follow something.
The next development will happen at Bundanon in July, and then, possibly a performance outcome later this year.
I am very grateful for the support of Lucy and the staff at LGI through this residency and process showing, and to my partner, Will.
– Caroline Meadon
About The Artists
Duane Morrison
Duane Morrison graduated from Melbourne University, majoring in Composition. Now working mainly in the field of electronic music production his skills in this area cover wide terrain.
Active in the composition of scores for contemporary dance in Melbourne, he has collaborated closely with choreographer Jo Lloyd for over 15 years, receiving a Green Room Award (Music Composition and Sound Design for Dance) for his work on Lloyd and Nicola Gunn’s Mermermer (Next Move 2016). He also received Green Room nominations for Apparently That’s What Happened (2008 with David Franzke), Future Perfect (2011/ Dance Massive 2013) and Overture (2018/19).
Other recent collaborations include Melbourne Museum’s LOVE exhibition, Christian Thompson’s Berceuse (2017) and Phantom (2018) and David Rosetzky’s Composite Acts (2019).
His work with theatre practitioner Nicola Gunn/Sans Hotel includes Green Screen for MTC Neon 2014 and In Spite Of Myself for Melbourne Festival 2013.
He has also produced the music for a number of short films and advertisements including 2018’s award-winning IKEA + YOU online and in-store campaign.
For many years he worked alongside club music label Vicious Vinyl, remixing many established Australian artists, and has played a part in releases that have earned accolades including numerous Aria awards and a UK #1 single (Madison Avenue’s ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’). Remixes as half of Sneaker Fox (with DJ Lorne Padman) include Gotye’s SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW.
William McBride
William McBride is a performer, choreographer, writer and dramaturg working primarily in dance and experimental performance. He is the Director of Melbourne, Australia-based experimental dance and performance organisation, Temperance Hall (https://www.temperancehall.com.au; https://www.instagram.com/temperance.hall).
His dance and performance work emphasises choreography as an artform that can access and influence subconscious and unconscious knowledge and experience – both for the artist/performer and for audiences; at an individual, and a collective/socio-cultural, level. His performance works orchestrate relationality, rhythm, timing, reference, persona and site-/context-responsive making, to develop rich associative experiences that swallow, metabolise and transcend literalness. From 2013–2023, he built a multi-award-winning body of work with collaborative trio, Alice Will Caroline (https://www.instagram.com/alicewillcaroline), including major works Lady Example (Substation/Arts House, for Next Wave and Dance Massive, 2018–19), Doors Shut (Green Room Award-winning work at Temperance Hall for Melbourne Fringe, 2019) and What’s Actually Happening (Kier Choreographic Award, 2022). He has worked as a performer with Triage Live Art Collective, Aphids/Lz Dunne, and Phillip Adams BalletLab/Walter Dundervill.
Since 2022 he worked as Executive Producer, and since 2024 as Director, of Temperance Hall, based in a significant heritage building on Bunurong/Boon Wurrung Country in South Melbourne, Australia. In this role, he designs programs, curates and produces a wide range of performance practices across dance, choreography and experimental performance. Will has also trained as a certified Alexander Technique teacher.
Caroline Meaden
I am a dance artist and speech pathologist based in Naarm/Melbourne. I have an interest in working with dance in an applied way as an autonomous formal medium and pairing this endeavour with speech and language-based investigations incorporating movement,
theatre and text. Many of my past works embrace a pluralistic ethos – incorporating multiple references and forms within dissonant, collage-like structures. These works have integrated text and dance without defaulting to a dance theatre sensibility. Rather, I have engaged in referencing and disrupting theatre conventions and devices (narrative, gesture, representation) through the application of choreographic logics and structures to disperse meaning.
Currently, my practice hones in on ‘dancing’; specifically, crafting refined movement languages within formal aesthetic frameworks, and allowing associative meanings to emerge from these materials over time. My interest in the rigor of formalism has been fuelled in recent years by an increased capacity and appetite for sustained solo studio practice as a mature performer and mid-career maker. My work does not dictate meanings or messages or require mutual agreement from a viewer. I am interested in prioritising the audience’s experience inasmuch as my dances can forge introspective spaces for reflective engagement with one’s own experiences, orientations, beliefs and attentional habits. I believe this type of audience engagement is needed to counter our collectively over-saturated digital diet of explicit and ‘understandable’ content that caters to viewers’ appetites for quick answers and affirmation. These values are evident in my work’s precise attunement to rhythm and time as a manifestation of care, and through performativity as a model for introspection and ‘aliveness’. My studio practice is rigorous and embedded in intuition and embodiment. It also encompasses other digestions and manifestations of embodied attention including drawing (carolinemeaden.com.au/dancedraw) and writing (carolinemeaden.com.au/writing). A full biography can be found at my website, carolinemeaden.com.au.