Torrent Blossom
Torrent Blossom is an online exhibition centring artists and writers whose practices challenge the colonial state of Australia.
From turbulent waves of social, cultural, political and environmental upheaval, it emerges, bathed, in the digital blue glow of our shared captivity and consciousness. Curated by Firstdraft and supported by the City of Sydney, Torrent Blossom brings together a selection of new and existing video artworks, presented in dialogue with newly commissioned critical and poetic texts.
S.J Norman
Duet
2013
Duet was produced and screened as part of a line of research in relation to Unsettling Suite, a suite of works which explored pastoralism and the various ideologies of anthropocentric dominance that underwrite it, originally presented by Carriageworks and Performance Space in 2013. It is made from found footage from the 1950s – recut from a video instructing trainee shearers how to deliver the correct pattern of blows over the body of a sheep in order to pull a complete fleece. The building confluence of the sheep and the shearer has echoes of Shibari (a Japanese style of bondage or BDSM incorporating visually intricate binding with rope), in the way the two bodies move together. Through subtle interventions – the eerie slowing and downward pitching of the original video and audio – the work both collapses and reveals layers of the pastoral psyche.
Duet is part of a suite of works which explored pastoralism and the various ideologies of anthropocentric dominance that underwrite it.
S.J Norman, Duet (still), 2013, video with sound, 9 minutes 42 seconds. Courtesy the artist
Duet was originally presented by Carriageworks and Performance Space, 2013
