Gunyah artist-in-residence program: March 2025

Bron Belcher and Harriet Gillies

Bron Belcher is a writer and director, and Harriet Gillies is a performance artist. They have previously worked together on three large scale contemporary performance projects at Next Wave Festival and Rising Festival; sharing a love of experimentation and rigorous creative process. Bron lives and works in Merri-bek, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Land (Melbourne, VIC), Harriet lives and works on Gadigal Land (Sydney, NSW).

Bron Belcher on the set of Asian Male 60s Lead, a Tough Crowd production, 2023

Bron Belcher is the Director of Schoolhouse Studios, an artist-led space for creatives and the local community in Melbourne. She has ten years of experience leading experimental and contemporary practice in Australia’s preeminent arts festivals and organisations. She has held integral roles at organisations such as RISING, Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, Next Wave Festival, Dark Mofo, and Brisbane Festival, working across Australia and internationally. Bron is also the co-founder of film and television production company, Tough Crowd, currently with a children's feature film in development and hosts a podcast about Australian film.

toughcrowd.pictures

Harriet Gillies, 8/8/8:WORK, Rising Festival, 2022

Harriet Gillies is an award-winning performance artist and writer/director, whose work spans digital, durational, participatory, visual, immersive, new writing and hybrid text forms of contemporary performance. She worked with Robert Wilson at the Watermill Centre and Marina Abramović at Kaldor Public Art Projects. She's presented works in Australia, New Zealand, Asia and North America. Residencies include La Serre: Arts Vivants in Montreal, Bearded Tit in Sydney, the Cad Factory in Narrandera. Harriet makes risky work in an increasingly risk-averse environment by embracing complex and paradoxical ideas. Her creative process allows audiences to contemplate the way that technology shapes contemporary psychology.

harrietgillies.com

"During our residency at Gunyah we are looking forward to being immersed in nature, deepening our collaborations and supporting each other's practices. We will be dramaturg and creative collaborator for each other..."

During their residency, Bron plans to develop a performance art project developed from her road trip through the Nullarbor: "Driving solo through the Nullarbor was life changing. By design, I had no one to talk to so began writing to express the many thoughts and feelings that came up on this journey. I know have 50 pages of dense, eclectic and charged writing I want to transform into performance."

Harriet plans to work on a short film storyboard about deep time: "My short film, I Want to See the Altars, is about a CEO who wakes up one day with an unshakeable drive to build altars out of everything around them to celebrate the beauty of the world. This drive threatens everything they have built for themselves, but sees them happier than ever before."

"... When we arrived at Gunyah we were heavy with the responsibilities of family life, work and the ongoing genocide of our people in Palestine and Lebanon. With so much weight inside us there was little space for the cells of creativity to bump and shine.

Each day walking down to the jetty at the mouth of the Karuah River, we imagined the water stretching to Bilad el Sham, the levant. Breathing deep our souls expanded far from Worimi country all the way home.