Art – Page 2 – Ian Gibbins

UGLY – a NOT fairytale

UGLY – a NOT fairytale was a mixed media stage performance performed at the Mercury Cinema in Adelaide as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 2022. A Labyrinth Production, it was directed by Georgina Hahn, featuring Kaelia Cockington, Michael Jaxon Carson, Keshia Vitor, Lilian Lava, Karney Doll and Vee Von Claire, written by Andrew Dudek, Georgina Hahn, Michael Jaxon Carson and Michele Saint-Yves, choreographed by Michael Jaxon Carson and Anania Tikolamadra, costumes by Summer Sumner. I created nearly 90 minutes of animated, synthesised and composited video that was projected onto the cinema screen behind the live action. I also composed some music for several section of the piece.

The story was a simple one about a young person coming to grips with their difference, in the face of the potentially conflicting elements of fire, air, earth and water, and the ever-present threat of their self-confidence being eclipsed by the ill-will of others. A constant metaphor was one of butterflies, with their metamorphosis from caterpillar to winged adult.

Making the video for UGLY was a long and complex process, requiring coordination and matching of many factors: the … Click here for more.

SALA 2023: Beyond the Floodtide…

SALA, the South Australian Living Arts Festival, is a statewide festival of visual art, spanning the entire month of August. In 2023, it involved over 700 venues across the state with nearly 11,000 participating artists. SALA is Australia’s largest and most inclusive visual arts festival, and takes place in galleries and non-traditional arts spaces across South Australia, featuring visual artists working at every level, in any medium, from all backgrounds and all parts of the state. Indeed, there are few if any festivals of this nature anywhere in the world.

For SALA 2023, I presented Beyond the Floodtide… a sequence of mostly new video works with environmental themes, at The Joinery in the Adelaide CBD, in collaboration with the Conservation Council of South Australia and coordinated by Sally Francis.

Faced with accelerating anthropogenic climate change, how will life on earth cope with global warming and rising sea levels? Plants, animals, humans, forms yet to evolve: all will need to adapt to challenging new environments. This video sequence imagines how we and the biosphere around us might deal with the consequences of our effects on the planet.

In addition to screening the videos at The Joinery on each Friday … Click here for more.

Beyond the Floodtide… SALA 2023 at The Joinery

SALA, the South Australian Living Arts Festival, is a statewide festival of visual art, spanning the entire month of August, and involving over 700 venues across the state with nearly 11,000 participating artists. SALA is Australia’s largest and most inclusive visual arts festival, and takes place in galleries and non-traditional arts spaces across South Australia, featuring visual artists working at every level, in any medium, from all backgrounds and all parts of the state. Indeed, there are few if any festivals of this nature anywhere in the world.

I have enjoyed participating in SALA in different ways over the years. For SALA this year, I am excited to present Beyond the Floodtide… a sequence of mostly new video works with environmental themes, at The Joinery in the Adelaide CBD, in collaboration with the Conservation Council of South Australia and coordinated by Sally Francis.

The Taken Path: a durational project – work in progress, 2023

The Taken Path trailer

Catherine Truman and I have been working together on projects bridging art and science since 2006. Here is a glimpse of our project, The Taken Path, undertaken in 2022-2023. This is a speculative, durational project that hangs of a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and filmed the journey?

Carrick Hill estate, nestled in the foothills of Adelaide, presents a conundrum of the delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. Here, pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life can be encountered at once. It is like a microcosm of the wider world.

Using an iPhone and a professional-quality video camera, we recorded a defined path that traverses natural and altered landscapes at Carrick Hill, at monthly intervals over a year to bring focus to these constantly shifting interrelationships.

The concept is simple, yet this embodied action, repeated over time, reveals profound shifts of climate and impacts of human industry. There seems to be an innate drive in us to intervene in, alter and reorder the natural environments around us, even if we have … Click here for more.

The Taken Path: a durational project with Catherine Truman

The Taken Path trailer

Catherine Truman and I have been working together on projects bridging art and science since 2006. Here is a glimpse of our current project, The Taken Path. This is a speculative, durational project that hangs of a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and filmed the journey?

Using an iPhone and a video camera, we filmed a defined path that traverses natural and altered landscapes at Carrick Hill, at monthly intervals over a year to bring focus to these constantly shifting interrelationships.

Interviews, reviews and discussions

Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate to be interviewed about my work for various festivals, events and websites. I’ve also been involved in discussions of my work with other artists. Every now and then, someone reviews or comments on my work. I am extremely grateful to all the people who have taken the time to be involved. Here are links to some of these items.

It was a huge pleasure to be interviewed by acclaimed poet David Adès for Poets’ Corner hosted by Westwords. Each month a poet is invited to read and talk about their poetry on a theme of the poet’s choice.

For this episode, we talked on the theme of Limits of language, limits of experience in the context of my poetry videos. We covered a lot of ground but the conversation falls naturally into more or less bite-sized chunks. We start with an extended discussion on the nature of video poetry, how they are made, how they can work, and more. Then we go on to talk about some of my specific pieces.

The Youtube clip includes excerpts of these videos, in order: after-image; Palingenetics; and furthermore (indexed); A … Click here for more.

Dragonflies swarming

For several days in December, 2022, Adelaide and surrounding areas swarmed with large dragonflies, that have bred in the very wet spring we’ve had this year. In this video, I’ve used a frame echo process to track and digitally illuminate the flight paths of the dragonflies as they fly around our garden in Belair, South Australia.

The soundtrack includes some of our native birds that were calling at the time: rainbow lorikeets, eastern shrike-thrush, magpies, red wattlebirds, New Holland honeyeaters, and kookaburras, as well as passing human traffic. The flower in the final sequence is a kangaroo paw, native to Western Australia.

Dragonflies have some of the most accomplished aerial abilities of any animal, with both high speed and high manoeuvrability. Associated with this, they have an advanced visual system, capable of seeing a wide range of colours as well as polarised light with very high resolution. Moreover, the part of the eyes that look up towards the sky have different optical properties compared with areas that look down, as befits the different environments in each visual domain. All this makes them extremely effective predators of other flying insects. Their larvae are fully aquatic and are also fierce predators, living … Click here for more.