Gretel Taylor and Gülsen Özer were both living in the Dandenong Ranges (Corhanwarrabul) in June 2021 when an extreme windstorm felled approximately 20% of the area’s trees. A meteorological explanation purported that the wind that night had come from an unusual direction - the southeast - that the Mountain Ash trees were not accustomed to withstanding. This project evolved as the artists’ homage to their experiences of the effects of severe wind upon environments and communities.
Taylor and Özer committed to a simultaneous daily practice over seven days in March 2023, whereby each artist would stand and then move in their respective environments, to sense, observe and respond to the wind. The artists conceived this practice as a return to the body as a powerful site for meaning-making, perception, and value in unpredictable times.
The performance at the opening of Invisible Winds exhibition comprised a series of gestures derived from the daily sessions, performed in the gallery as a duet: an embodied mapping of affect.
Gretel Taylor & Gülsen Özer - dance
Laki Sideris - photography
CLIMARTE Gallery, 120 Bridge Rd, Richmond
26 April – 27 May 2023
https://climarte.org/project/invisible-winds/
Iceland 2017
Dancer Gretel Taylor expresses overwhelm at the vastness of the Icelandic landscape. The dance is an attempt to become present in this alien place. This video was shot during the dawn hours as the environment began to reveal itself. Gretel was responding in real time to this changing light.
Head On Photo Festival
Festival Hub
Paddington Town Hall
249 Oxford St2021
Paddington , NSW
04 May 2019 to 19 May 2019
Tactile engagement with corrosive and crystalline qualities of salt is evoked through close-range images of dancer Gretel Taylor’s body immersed in sites in the Murray Darling region. In contrast, drone footage of Taylor’s site-responsive dance reveals the vast context of whitened decimated landscape. Scourge suggests salinity and other ecological imbalances in this region parallel the other 'scourge of whiteness' since colonisation, lamenting our greed and insensitivity to the ecologies that have sustained millennia.
Taylor has evolved an improvised site-responsive dance practice, which she calls 'locating'. It is a dance of actively sensing and responding to her surrounding environment in an attempt to find orientation, seeking relationship and longing to ‘fit in’. Yet Taylor, as a white Australian, is aware of her alterity, which she feels is loaded with the debt of colonisation: an uneasy disjunction from place that stems from implication in the violence and injustice of this nation’s repressed history of dispossession. The locating dance remains in the present tense to reflect the processual: it is a dance that she does not anticipate will ever be complete.
Scourge will be created specifically and presented as a premiere for SALT BODY at Arts Mildura Gallery. SALT BODY is an opportunity for Taylor and videographer Laki Sideris to further their creative partnership by combining their drone-dance exploration with land-based videography to express human, embodied-scale in relation to the vast geographic scale of ecological impact at once. Salinity as an issue in the Murray Darling region, specifically around Mildura, offers a deep and critical theme for their evolving practice.
SALT BODY at Arts Mildura Gallery
September 1 - October 13, 2019
Holding Pattern 2022
BURRINJA GALLERY, Upway, Victoria
https://exhibitions.burrinja.org.au/portfolio/co-habit/
From the Anthropause or quietening of human life necessitated by Covid-19, the possibility emerged for a kind of re-positioning of humans and the non-human world, whereby we might take a less domineering role. As we rush to return to our anthropocentric lives, Co-habit is a reminder of this possibility.
Images: https://lakisideris.squarespace.com/peeling
Gretel runs through the straight lines of a plantation forest in Jadwadjali Country, western Victoria. Grown to be cut down, the skinny trunks of trees are peeling: their bark is that stringy variety. She attempts to move with these discarded materials, entwining with the recently imposed, temporary ecology of this place.
SALT BODY at Arts Mildura Gallery
September 1 - October 13, 2019
2020
Dancer: Gretel Taylor
Maria Island, Tasmania 2019
‘Whose place is this anyway and do I fit in?’
The familiarity of home is unstuck and re-rendered as Gretel’s body is curiously orientated in domestic space, probing questions of belonging, disjunction from and re-inhabitation of place.
HEARTH was created in a ruined house on Maria Island, Tasmania, which has been part of the land and waters of the Puthikwilayti people for over 40,000 years, a penitentiary settlement from 1825-50 and is now a national park teeming with wildlife.
HEARTH was presented as part of House-Body' MAP Moreland
Siteworks, Brunswick, Feb 2019.
Dancer: Gretel Taylor
Projected as part of the Force of Nature exhibition
Yarra Ranges Regional Museum
08 September - 14 October, 2018
From series: Poetics of Home 2020
This project curated by Gretel Taylor invited dancers with expertise in site-specificity and creating dance for video, to draw inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's classic text, The Poetics of Space, to create short screendance works with/in their homes.
Created during the COVID-19 lockdown period, the project focuses on close-range kinaesthetic relationships with familiar objects and architecture, revisiting Bachelard's Poetics as a catalyst for danced departures. Bachelard transformed domestic spaces by articulating their psychic and mnemonic effects, to render these relationships alive, intriguing, shimmering.
Supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.
https://www.greteltaylor.com/poetics-of-home.html
LAUNCH: Friday 26th June 2020