Labyrinthian sidesteps:

INFLUENCES:

• René Daumal’S MOUNT ANALOGUE



• Michel Foucault’s OF OTHER SPACES: UTOPIAS AND HETEROTOPIAS

• Agnosticism as a methodology for 16mm film montage
  
  
• Sound theory (Michel Chion, Lawrence English, et. al)
  
  
• Expanded Cinema (Gene Youngblood, Jonathan Walley, Tacita Dean, Bill Morrison et. al)
  
  
• Aristotle’s Poetics
• Literary motifs, poetry and fiction
  
• The sublime
• Conceptual Romanticism
• Feminist Gothic 
• Tropical Gothic
• Theseus’ Ship and sisyphean processes
• Theatricality of the gaze manifest as myth and construct
• Nature – culture symbiosis and humanity as it meets environments (Donna Haraway, Val Plumwood, Process Cinema)
• Derrida and the decentred periphery
  
• Sensory phenomenology, immersion, and spatial practices

“Woodnutt’s cinema, however, has increasingly treated this dark ambiance as a substance rather than a shadow zone.”
- Edward Colless, for Art Collector magazine.

“...her work operates with a rare blend of intellectual clarity, material sensitivity and poetic imagination.“
- Sean Lowry, Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies in Art at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.





FROM ITALO CALVINO’S INVISIBLE CITIES:
Trading Cities 4

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

• ABOUT

In short:
Melody Woodnutt is an Australian contemporary artist and filmmaker who works primarily within the expanded field of 16mm analogue moving image film. Her installations further this material concern deeper into sound, light, and spatial practices. Her practice is often described through conceptual romanticism, hauntology, time, the nature-culture symbiosis, and phenomenological ideas. Her 16mm films communicate imaginative, autoethnographic, and allegorical experiences of intimacy, memory, spectres, and abstracted liminal spaces.

Expanded:
Melody Woodnutt is a descendant of the pirate Blackjack Woodnutt, and has rambled around the world before landing in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia in 2018. She spent eight of her formative artistic years (2010-2018) living in a remote Icelandic village between a mythopoetic mountain and the Greenland Sea. Her artistic foundations have formed from the immense phenomenology of the Icelandic natural world, pagan ideology, space and place, and the immeasurable poetics of spirit which remains influential to her ongoing work thereafter.

Melody Woodnutt works primarily within the expanded field of 16mm analogue moving image film. Artworks take form as large scale immersive installations, expanded cinema, short 16mm films, or printed photographic film stills.  Her primary material concerns are in sound, light, spatial practices and 16mm analogue moving image. Melody's films are often made from an alchemical feminist position as default, alongside bio-art's concept of “witches in labs”.

Conceptually as a throughline, her artworks pinpoint specific junctures of humanity (emotion, phenomena, body)  and its environment (societal, familial, political, natural etc) in order to humanise structures. This includes autoethnographic and allegorical approaches that abstract subjectivity through fiction/montage.

With a deep pull towards unknowable realms such as the sea, cosmos, or spectral worlds, paired with explorations of intimacy and poetics, the consequent artworks become abstracted glimpses of a deeply unknown world; becoming privy to the veil of a thing-in-itself. Comparable to a poem’s ability to obscure and reveal while holding myriad meanings, the same approach is taken in her work. Her interest in cinematic montage reflects her agnostic position in exploring poetic meaning.


She is currently an active member of Artist Film Workshop - an artist-run film lab for analogue small gauge film. Biennially, she is the artistic director of international film platform and immersive residency, The Weight of Mountains, which uses film as research in-the-field to explore psycho geographies and connections between humanity and environment over temporal and geographic dis/connects.

*** 

Works have been shown within Australia at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, NGV Melbourne Design Week, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Federation Square, Northsite Contemporary Arts, Bunjil Place, NotFair Art Fair, Gertrude St Projection Fetival, Science Gallery, West Space, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, One Star Gallery, MARS Gallery, Cecil Place Precinct, Victorian College of the Arts, Mission to Seafarers, Melbourne Fringe (Fringe keynote project curated by Emily Sexton and Martyn Coutts). 

Internationally: PICA (Oregon, USA), Atlantic Center for the Arts (USA), Bio Paradis (Iceland), Westminster School of Law (UK), Oberhausen Film Festival (DE), Klondike Institute of Arts (CA), and a variety of festivals, conferences, and venues in USA, UK, Canada, Iceland, Europe, and Morocco.

Supported with grants from the VCA Foundation, Arts Queensland, Youth Arts Queensland, Menningarráð Norðurlands Vestra (Iceland), Vaxtarsamnigur Norðurlands Vestra (Iceland), Rannis Innovation+Research Triennial Funding (Iceland), and Kulturkontakt Nord (Baltic/Nordic EU). Alongside positions as Director for Nes Artist Residency (Iceland); Artistic Direction and Regional Development Advisor for Thekkingarsetur Iceland (a research and development organisation under the Icelandic Ministry for Education and Culture); consultant for The Icelandic Textile Center (Iceland), Artistic Director of The Weight of Mountains (global ARI); Co-Director of Exist Live Art and Performance Art Collective (Australia); curator of the Summer We Go Public Festival (Iceland) and Site Exploratory Arts Festival (Iceland).

Profiled in Art Collector Magazine (Australia), IceView Arts Magazine (Iceland), Lo Squaderno Academic Journal (Italy).

Melody has also volunteered with Resartis.org and spoken on panels and conferences regarding remote artist residencies.