REBECCA WATERSTONE

Lumière Website

Lumière, French for light, was the starting point for this festival. As light illuminates the darkness it also brings the moving image to life. Over 10 days in 2022, 40 luminous artworks, installations, immersive experiences and events were created by 25 extraordinary artists living and working in, or with a strong connection to the Blue Mountains. Works were located in unusual and unexpected places including the salons and grounds of historic Mount Victoria Manor - currently home to Hotel Etico, Australia’s first social enterprise hotel, where young adults with intellectual disabilities develop hospitality skills and knowledge, establish life-skills, and gain independence. Mount Vic Flicks vintage cinema, Rhomboid Studio & Performance Space, shops and laneways enabled visitors to discover familiar and hidden local, personal and collective stories via lyrical interpretations of light and liminality.

Lumière traced the multifaceted trajectories of the moving image over time and space. Audiences journeyed from cinema’s earliest beginnings, when the Lumière brothers, and Eadweard Muybridge brought their radical visions and innovations to the world, to the first-ever ‘science-fiction’ silent film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon) by Georges Mèliérs, to iconic guest artist, Roger Foley-Fogg’s legendary 1960s psychedelic lightshows, culminating in a series of new, commissioned digital works that employed experimental new-media processes, such as Peachey & Mosig’s activation of the manor’s mirror room with 3D projection-mapping, and Kenneth Lambert’s ‘zero-aperture’ digital re-telling of the star-gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My dual-channel film here/there screened at Mount Vic Flicks vintage cinema, and in Mt Victoria Manor, and also as part of the digital online program. The dialogue between the two films, made in both the Blue Mountains, Australia, and the Isle of Skye, Scotland, merges and blurs realities, depicting liminal experiences of living between one place physically, and another in mind and heart. The motif of mountains binds the films’ visual narratives. The pull, and yearning for one place, and the people in it, when located in another, is profound. The spoken word audio is a reading of a (fictional) British Shipping Forecast - folk tune in to this service late at night to hear the mellifluous tones of the broadcaster softly reading the onshore/offshore forecast for lyrically-named locations such as Dogger Fisher, Fastnet and Viking. It acts as a reassuring anchor, or lullaby, conjuring romantic images of life at sea on the wild coastlines of Britain (here, the Hebrides), while listeners rest safe and dry in their beds, or by a warm fireplace - ostensibly experiencing two opposing realities at once. Often describing elemental, tempestuous, potentially life-threatening weather outside, it is also a fitting metaphor for the experience of being in a protected, nourishing place physically, while searching for a way to ride out the internal storms of aching for loved ones, navigating uncertainty and coping with enforced distance that tears at the soul.

Over the course of 17 years, I moved in and out of these states of overlapping realities - living in two places at once - simultaneously present in one place, while in another in my head and heart. This duality was both intensely rich and nourishing, essentially living two lives, while also creating a heightened sense of angst, longing, uncertainty and limbo.

The films establish a third, merged reality observed from a safe distance. I made this work to bring this experience outside of myself, transforming it into external matter, giving respite to my mind and heart, whilst also enabling others to experience and relate to it. Making my internal states into separate, tangible external entities was an attempt to unravel and understand the tangled complexities of this existence, and navigate more freely between the dichotomous states - two hemispheres, two continents, two states of being, two full lives of families, friends and places. The mingling of images and sound, alternately fusing or pulling in opposite directions, embodies the tensions felt in living simultaneously in multiple worlds.