Residency report: You're only half an hour away, Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas

"... 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.

Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas, Gunyah residency, 2025 
 
On our first morning we walked to Hero’s Beach. Could we swim through the rivers and oceans to the land of our ancestors? The water’s temperature was Mediterranean, a sign to heed.

We collected rocks, sticks and shells to rub, wanting to continue a practice in archiving, planning and dreaming. Maissa’s exploration in how we remain and how we connect.

Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas, Gunyah residency, 2025

At night Katie tried to teach Maissa tatreez, Palestinian cross stitch. The motifs tie us to land. At Gunyah, we decide that Ward el Sham, damascene rose, motif of Bilad el Sham ties us to each other. Katie stitched it on everything - a handmade fisherman’s hat from Tripoli, a rubbing of single waraq areeshi, vine leaf. Charcoal rubbings of tatreez brings us closer.

Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas, Gunyah residency, 2025

In our afternoons, we returned to the jetty. Wearing our thobes we talked about the boats bobbing on the river. Could we sail through the rivers and oceans to the land of our ancestors? We know our people's trade routes connected them with our city’s ports. We imagined roots.
Maissa filmed our imagined return.

Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas, Gunyah residency, 2025

At Gunyah we rolled waraq enab together. The leaves picked from the grape vines growing wild in our migrant backyards half an hour away from each other. We argued about everything; the rice stuffing, the same way we argued about how to make fool medames, a poor people’s dish of fava beans from the Arab world. We laughed and made up over videos for a future tiktok influencer project coming out soon.
Could we just earn enough money to fly over the rivers and oceans to the land of our ancestors?

Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas, Gunyah residency, 2025

Katie wrote a poem in English about our time at Gunyah.
Maissa responded with writing in Arabic language and turned it into a song, a secret for now because she needs money to pay a producer, another project.

Maissa’s niece, an artist and a musician, visited with her partner, a Yuin man. While Jace spent time feeding us off the land and waters, fishing and collecting oysters. Tamara and Maissa tried their hand at composing songs from words sewn together from Katie’s poem.

We returned to our family homes with a big pot of waraq enab to share with our loved ones, and a plethora of ideas to work on together and make reality. After some rest comes revolution. Free Palestine. ..."


Gunyah residency report, February 2025
You're only half an hour away
Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas










Upcoming Artists-in-Residence: You're only half an hour away, Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas

You're only half an hour away: Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas

You're only half an hour away, is a collaboration of multidisciplinary artist and vocalist, Maissa Alameddine, and writer Katie Shammas. They are artists from Lebanon & Palestine, now based in Sydney on Dharug Country, their collaborative practice evokes ancestral stories.   

Maissa Alameddine, A lullaby for a rising, 2024, still from video 


Maissa Alameddine grew up in Lebanon, now lives and works on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal and Dharug peoples. She is an interdisciplinary artist and vocalist, working across photography, video, installation, sound design and live performance. Maissa’s work explores the idea of migration as a chronic injury. Her work is personal, exploring inheritance and transference of heritage in the complexity of the diasporic experiences. Her work centres on storytelling and community, working through intersectional and intergenerational approaches that challenge normative discourses and prioritise self-determined processes in the contemporary art world. Maissa is co-founder and creative producer of Arab Theatre Studio, an arts collective initiated out of Dharug Land. @maissa

Maissa Alameddine, Song For Sitti- Song for my Grandmother,
video and textile installation, The Blake Prize 2024

Katie Shammas is from Galilee Palestine, now living on Dharug Country in north-west Sydney. She is a member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and Arab Theatre Studio. Her writing has been published in Meanjin, Povo, Kindling and Sage and Red Room Poetry. She has performed work for Cement Fondu: Better Nature; Word Travels: Chasing Home, and RedRoom Poetry: Speak Australian. She is the mother of two daughters and works in the environmental sector. @kootie75

Katie Shammas reading The song that fills the valley, POVO, Sweatshop, 

Better Read than Dead, Newtown 2023


"... During our residency at Gunyah we plan to collaborate deeply, creating art that navigates memory, resistance, and connection in a space of healing and possibility. Amid grief from witnessing ongoing genocide on our homelands, we seek rest and reflection, and time together to lay the foundations of a long-time project we have been wanting to develop. Our process of collaborating at Gunyah will honour our shared heritage and respond to the tension between urgent creativity and grief. By reflecting on and researching ancestral journeys between Haifa and Tripoli, we plan to harness the stories of our elders who travelled these routes. Then we will infuse these narratives with art and music. ..." 

Katie Shammas, Knowledge of Land, Kindling and Sage, November 2023



You can find out more about You're only half and hour away: Maissa Alameddine & Katie Shammas on Instagram @maissa and @kootie75.

Announcing the 2025 Gunyah Artists-in-Residence


Thank you to everyone who applied for the 2025 Gunyah Artists-in-Residence program!

And thanks to the selection panel, Danica Knezevic and Kath Fries. 

There will be writers, musicians, curators, researchers, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, storytellers, photographers, collaborations and families; from NSW, ACT and VIC; participating in 2025 residencies at Gunyah, on Worimi Land.

We are delighted to announce the artists selected for the 2025 Gunyah Artists-in-Residence Program:

  • You're only half an hour away: Katie Shammas & Maissa Alameddine 
  • Harriet Gillies & Bron Belcher
  • Elise Harmsen & Nicola Smith 
  • Zipper: Celeste Aldahn & Liam Kenny 
  • The Happy Mondays: Jodi Vial, Josepha Dietrich, Betty O'Neill, Catherine Johnstone 
  • Ren Gregorčič 
  • Catherine Polcz 

You can follow @gunyahartists on Instagram to see posts from their residencies during the year.


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Gunyah artists-in-residence program is located on Gathang Land, the ancestral Country of the Worimi People. We acknowledge them as the traditional custodians of this place, land, sky, and waters. When artists come to the Gunyah to develop and share their own creativity, learning, skills and cultural practices, we respect the knowledge embedded forever within the First Nations Custodianship of Country.



2025 Gunyah residency applications now open!

Calling for 2025 Gunyah Artists-in-Residence applications!
Background photo: Kath Fries, Gunyah waterfront

I'm delighted to announce that applications are now open for the 2025 Gunyah Artists-in-Residence Program!

Since 2011, the Gunyah AiR program has been providing low cost accommodation for short term self-directed residencies for solo, collaborative, family and group projects. 

 

Applications are now open for visual artists, writers, composers, musicians, performers, directors, and other creators, to apply for a 2025 Gunyah residency. 


There will be seven residencies in 2025, each running for ten days. See the APPLY page for the specific dates available and subsided artist rates. 


Please read ABOUT GUNYAH before applying and see the APPLY page for links to the online applications forms. 

 

Applications close midnight 16 December 2024. 

Residency report: Bronwyn Rennex

Bronwyn Rennex, Gunyah Kookaburras 

I’m working on a creative non-fiction project and thinking about birds, so being at Gunyah was a great opportunity to s.l.o.w.d.o.w.n. and observe. I eased myself into a different scale of being, a lovely respite from sitting at my desk in Newtown getting caught up in doom scrolling, bill paying, grocery shopping, clothes hanging…

Bronwyn Rennex, Gunyah fire

 

At Gunyah I listened to unfamiliar birds bring in the day. I watched the pair of noisy miners (… my friend Dave called them pardalotes … I still think I’m right), whose nest is just above the back deck, defend their chick(s) from the daily incursions of bigger birds. I paddled across the water towards the island, where what looked like a pale branch at the top of a tree, ended up being the white breast of a sea eagle surveying its world. At night it was cold enough to have fires. 

 

Bronwyn Rennex, Adam and Bron at Gunyah


I worked pretty solidly each day, whether it was writing, going down Google rabbit holes via famous Bronwyns; through to Welsh mythology; and a story about soldiers carrying the head of fellow warrior back home, where it continued chatting to them for the next 7 years; or reading what Ralph Clark wrote about dreams and birds in his journal. My partner Adam visited for a few days, then my friends Dave and Janet came. It was lovely to be able to share the experience with them and enjoy the added bonus of their excellent cooking skills.

 

Bronwyn Rennex, Gunyah reading


I’ve come back to Newtown refreshed and inspired to continue working. Thanks so much Kath and Gunyah for the gift of space and time.


Bronwyn Rennex, Gunyah jetty selfie panorama


Gunyah residency report, October 2024
Bronwyn Rennex

Residency report: Karlina Mitchell and Lee Mitchell

Gunyah was a time of rest and productivity. We started by working on individual projects, I spent time writing and reflecting on work and exhibitions I have been part of over the last 12 months. Lee found an amazing resource at the local Hawks Nest tip and finished a series of zines made from reclaimed books and paper. We went on bushwalks around North Arm Cove, I took photos and we worked on developing ideas for our collaborative project. The project explores our childhood experiences and we found this being reflected in the adventures we had with our kids when at Gunyah.


Gunyah residency report, September 2024
Karlina Mitchell & Lee Mitchell


Karlina Mitchell, photograph.

Lee Mitchell, zine.


Upcoming artist-in-residence: Bronwyn Rennex

Bronwyn Rennex

Bronwyn Rennex is a writer, artist and arts professional, living on Gadigal Land, in Sydney's inner west. Her creative non-fiction work combines pictures and words - sometimes her own, sometimes others' - to consider how history resonates in the present. Bronwyn is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle and 2024 Visiting Scholar at State Library of NSW.


Bronwyn Rennex, Life with Birds, 2022


Bronwyn's first book, 'Life with Birds' was published by Upswell in 2022. It's a delicate commonplace book that invests in the small scale, the domestic and the ordinary as an essential and overlooked part of Australian military history.


Bronwyn Rennex, No, No, No, 2004, cyanotype



"... During my residency I plan to continue my work with the idiosyncratic First Fleet journals of Ralph Clark who, as his transcribers suggested, might be 'the original whinging Pom'. I have collated extracts from his journals and plan to use the residency to respond to and riff off them, thinking about dreams, women, colonisation and birds ..."


You can find out more about Bronwyn's work on her website bronwynrennex.com and Instagram @frombron
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