FAWN

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Event FAWN
Venue Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm, QLD
Umbrella Event Melt Festival
First Date 17 November 2022
Opening Date 17 November 2022
Last Date 15 December 2022
Dates Estimated No
Status Professional
World Premiere Yes
Description FAWN is a tender exploration of grief, reciprocity, care and popular culture. This video work is the latest iteration in an ongoing project by feminist art collective APHIDS that explores the contours of grieving a parent, as embodied by performer-participants with lived experience, including lead artist Lara Thoms. In FAWN, performer-participants do not put words or narrative to their grief; they are not asked to monumentalise or eulogise. Rather, the work explores the intimacies of a life lived alongside the loss of a parent. The performers first appear alone, dressed as Disney orphans and other characters in children's literature and cinema missing a parental figure, such as Pippi Longstocking, Nemo, Dumbo and Batman. As they dance, preen, or read, their performances are playful, even a little defiant - but as the work develops, we see them gravitate towards each other. Rather than following the heroes' journeys of a Disney orphan, for whom parental death is a single, instigating event that often leads to adventure, this tender performance meditates on the continuity of parental grief, and its slippery relationship with intimacy, family, and care. The figures who occupy FAWN honour the myriad of daily, seemingly minor experiences of absence that follow the loss of a parental figure. The performers care for each other in a manner that is intimate, tender and sometimes even frivolous -“ from brushing another'™s teeth or applying band-aids, to holding each other. The ministrations between performers mimic parental care, bringing its absence into conversation with the presence of new, temporary, queered notions of intimacy and family. The work meditates on the reality that grieving a parent entails much more than just the monumental loss of a single person; it is the loss of a paradigm of care, either lived or imagined. This experience of loss reverberates throughout the minutiae of the everyday.
Description Source Website
Primary Genre Other
Secondary Genre Film
Subjects Family
Grief
Loss
Popular Culture
Organisations
Contributors
Name Function Notes
Verity Mackey Costume Designer
Lara Thoms Director Lead Artist & Director
Mish Grigor Dramaturg/e
Tommy Thoms Editor
Lou McLaren Hair Stylist Hair + Make Up
Anna Nalpantidis Producer
Tom Smith Sound Designer
Alice Stevens Video Director DOP
Alec Barnett Gaffer
Xanthe Dobbie Wed Design
Text Nationality Australia
Production Nationality Australia
Further Information Online Exhibition
Event Status Completed
Data Source
Source Description
Web https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/aphids-fawn/
Event Identifier 169284
Dataset AusStage