Bundanon

Vanessa Godden (they, them) is a queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist, educator, and curator. Their transdisciplinary practice explores how personal histories and the body in relation to geographic space can be conveyed through oral and somatic storytelling in art. They draw from their multi-ethnic diasporic experiences to build multi-sensory performances, videos, sound installations, book art pieces, and net-art that unfurl the impacts of trauma on the body, connections to community, and tethers to culture.

Thembi Soddell is a sound artist best known for their powerful acousmatic performances and installations in darkness of “startling, even hallucinatory, intensity” (New Zealand Listener). Their primary tool is the sampler, generating sounds from field recordings, found objects, instrument textures, and abstracted voice to offer audiences intense encounters with the psychological impact of sound and darkness in connection to their own lived experience of mental illness.

In Residence at Bundanon

Inspired by the books, ‘Queer Kinship’ edited by Tyler Broadway and Elizabeth Freeman, and ‘Disability Intimacy’ edited by Alice Wong, for this residency media artists Vanessa Godden and Thembi Soddell will be collaborating on an exploration of their own queer kinship through artistic exchange. This work prioritises queer platonic love – its beauty, ineffability and exquisite value as, quite literally, life saving. While much of their previous work has explored trauma and loss, this new collaboration highlights love and what’s been gained, drawing on each artist’s ability to convey ineffable experiences in relationships through engagement with the sound and the body.