BEAST (Video 2021)
A work that explores a charged childhood space of abuse and intimacy. Violence and tenderness. But mostly it’s a work about resilience. It’s a
love letter to survival.
ELANDS. ‘I live in a place called Elands,’ I remember boasting as a grubby barefooted hippy kid. Even telling other
people that word made me feel like I was from another planet. Elands. Something about the way that it sat on your
tongue when you spoke it. Like a secret only half ready to come out. Somewhere strange and magical and high up in
the clouds. Full of weird creatures. The wilds. A world of its own. But Elands also shared some of the magical spirit we’d
known briefly in the intentional community of Findhorn, northern Scotland, before my family emigrated to Australia.
In the 1970s and ‘80s while our counterculture parents were wrestling with their own complicated dynamics and the
lure of new ways of being, us hippy kids were gifted a childhood that was as wide and open as the mountain sky. I
don’t really remember ever being inside. Or even going to school. No mobile phones. No ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’. No
white bread. Our education came from the lessons of nature, its beauty and brutality. Learning to read the river. Testing
our mettle by jumping over the Ellenborough where it narrows at the top of the Falls. Dogs perished there. There was
a suicide, there was an accident. But we kept going back to the edge. Thundering through the sweep of the valley till
we fell, dizzy and drunk, midnight bareback horse rides, eating chapatis and powdered milk at the kids’ house. Falling
asleep stoned, under clapped out Holdens, while the adults danced up the sun and sunk the full moon.