Annelise Roberts and Jack Palmer are partners who live on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong country in Melbourne.
Annelise is a writer and academic. Her fiction, poetry and criticism have appeared in Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, Going Down Swinging, Rabbit Journal and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2021 A. D. Hope Prize by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and the manuscript for her unpublished novel Totem was shortlisted for the 2022 Penguin Literary Prize. Her creative interests include experimental diarising, working with unfamiliar technical/scientific languages and archival material, and the personal essay.
I plan to use the Gunyah residency to finalise edits for my novel Totem, which explores the legacy of the British nuclear testing in South Australia in the 1950s through a family lineage. I also hope to continue work on a collection of creative essays on a range of topics, including Australian suburban garden aesthetics, the 2003 Canberra bushfires, and lyrebirds and mimesis. Although I’ve developed a particular approach to writing these essays, I don’t yet have a sense of the shape of the collection as a whole – the residency will be a great opportunity to spend some time thinking about this.
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Annelise Roberts, 'Pine', 2019. 35mm film |
Jack is an artist, music producer, guitarist and music educator. He works with computer music production, improvisation, video, and installation. Jack’s work is characterised by paradox and emotional contradiction - urgency held by meditative equipoise. In 2013 Jack graduated from the ANU School of Music with a major in jazz guitar. Since then he has featured as a performer/artist at ACCA, La Mama Theatre, Testing Grounds, George Patton Gallery, One Night in Footscray, and West Projections Festival, among others. He has collaborated with dancers, visual artists, musicians, and poets, and has composed and performed across electronic music, jazz, post-rock, and experimental genres. www.jackpalmer.net
For a number of years I have been interested in the potential of synaesthetic perception, such as mental imagery in hearing, or psycho-aural sensation in seeing. For me these experiences suggest the potential of a unified perception, a cognisance that apprehends phenomena before they are objectified as images, sounds, physical textures etc. As part of my exploration of this, I have been playing around with “charging” objects with non-conceptual or "felt-meaning" using sound. This just means developing a strong association between an object and a sound. Sound can produce non-conceptual meaning — music is the obvious example — and objects can be containers for non-conceptual meaning. So, how can we play with this artistically? Can we charge objects with non-conceptual felt-meaning using sound? How does the sound change our experience of the object and how does the object change our experience of the sound? What meaning could be produced in such a situation? For my Gunyah residency I plan to work on an audio-visual music composition that utilises and explores this very ordinary yet habitually unexamined phenomenon. The opportunity to share the residency with my partner Annelise and develop our ideas together is also very inspirational.
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Jack Palmer, Soma, La Mama Theatre. |
