Authors
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Lizzie Buckmaster Dove
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Annemaree Dalziel
Keywords:
walking, place, Country, Indigenous guidance, deep listening, grief, radical hope, relation, true naming, connection, attention
Abstract
Annemaree Dalziel and Lizzie Buckmaster Dove collaborate to perform a walking essay where “essay” is both noun and verb. A literary composition built from words (noun) emerges from the verb “essay”: ‘to make an often tentative or experimental effort to perform: to try’. The artists perform walks in adjacent places, with Gundungurra Country in Mittagong and Dharawal Country in Coledale.
As they walk, each step takes them into Country, activating memories from this and other places. Attention turning to deep listening, they take grief, place and time into an embodied sensorium. Gathering imprints and field notes the artists identify and respond to crevices… in the pleats of mountain and coast that mirror the enfolded sensoria of our bodies; that reflect secret places of survival in the rapid unfolding of what bell hooks calls dominator culture. They walk sustained by Rebecca Solnit’s definition of radical hope.
At the day’s end they write to one another about the quiet, overlooked and marginal sensed in each place using bell hooks’ method of narrative mapping; the artists build maps with words, feet and more-than-human collaborators. Subsequent guided walks in each place draw the two walkers and texts together; feet and words strengthen and make visible concurrent narratives witnessed in the crevice communities encountered. The artists re-assemble walks and words in a process of call and response: interweaving, expanding and amplifying the unseen, unheard, the forgotten, the brushed aside and the ineffable: the murmurations of place, acknowledging John Berger and Anne Michael’s conversational Railtracks text.
Author Biographies
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Lizzie Buckmaster Dove
Lizzie Buckmaster Dove is an Australian artist and writer living and working on Wadi Wadi Country in Wollongong and Yuin Country in Manyana, New South Wales. Her practice extends across writing, photography, sculpture, walking art practice and installation; exploring identity, connection and sense of place. In 2021 she was awarded a three-week Restart residency through West Darling Arts and premiered her large-scale immersive installation Coming up for Breath combining video, fabric and sound at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery. In 2017 she was the joint winner of the inaugural All into Ocean Pools writing award for her creative non-fiction essay Archaeology of Sea Pools: A Love Letter and received international attention for her Australia Council of the Arts funded work Pool, the Alchemy of Blue exhibited at Wollongong Art Gallery in 2013. She is currently a Masters of Philosophy candidate at the University of Wollongong straddling Creative Arts and Human Geography. Lizzie’s research considers the ethics walking as a non-Indigenous Australian artist, and is guided by Wadi Wadi elder Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson.
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Annemaree Dalziel
Annemaree Dalziel is an artist, activist and performance maker living and working on Gundungurra/Tharawal country in Mittagong, Australia. Her interdisciplinary, collaborative practice has immersed her in communities, ecologies, award-winning creative teams and artist-run initiatives, across NSW for more than 30 years. Her sensory installations and minimal sets investigate locations of power, connection to place, and the visibility of marginalised and displaced communities. Her costumes for contemporary performance works have toured Australia and internationally, notably with Stalker Theatre and Māori–Australian dancer and choreographer Victoria Hunt. In 2020, she founded the Sybil Disobedients to draw attention to the existential threats of climate change, environmental destruction and social injustice. Emulated by activist protest-performances around Australia, the Sybils have been described as an embodiment of radical hope. She is currently a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate at the University of Wollongong. Her socially engaged research uses textiles, walking conversation and installation to explore embodied memory of intergenerational cultural grief, and colonial moral injury, with descendants of displaced Gaelic-speaking Scots living on Gundungurra/Tharawal country in the Southern Highlands of NSW.
