Meet Performance Space's 2025 Experimental Fellowship Recipient
Performance Space is thrilled to announce the recipient of the Experimental Performance Fellowship - Emma Maye Gibson.
Emma Maye Gibson (AKA Betty Grumble) is a Warrane/Sydney based performance artist. Largely through the avatar/war mask/love letter/critter of Grumble she engages her body as a hopeful and medicinal site for catharsis and pleasure. Often moving in a genre smash of ritual theatre, autobiography, cabaret, performance art and multi-media, she is a proud ecosexual and believes in art as an action of her spirituality.
Through this Fellowship Emma Maye will undertake research and develop her practice through BODY SPELL, a multidisciplinary live art experimental group activation that seeks to arm audience with co-authored ritual, restoration and release.
BODY SPELL is a program of research that will have Emma Maye seek out ancestral knowledge through physical place and unseen dimensions. It grows out of the compost of Grumble worldbuilding asking her to arrive with renewed rigour, language and questions for how and who she is in performance practice. Using the gifts she has been given by the queer underground, border riders, rascals and poets she begins this protection spell - where we all become conduit, collaborator and magicians within an awakening process. A gathering of intent - a time where we can reflect on shared values and mythos and wrestle back our psyche from despair.
Emma Maye says "Receiving this fellowship excites me into deeper relationships with practice, mentors and community. It is vital time and space to reflect, renew and receive. Thank You Body."
A note from Kate Britton, Artistic Director
I could not be more excited to be working with long-time Pspace collaborator Emma Maye Gibson as our 2025 Experimental Performance Fellow. Over years, Emma Maye has forged a unique and impactful creative practice that defies disciplines, building an audience in both contemporary art spaces and queer communities. Through the Grumble character, she has embodied the potential of live performance to engage and provoke, to build community and offer transformative experiences. I cannot wait to see this hard-working artist undertake their program of deep research and development towards new work that both draws on and moves beyond Grumble.
Performance Space's unique and vital Fellowship is generously supported by our incredible Pspace donors through the Future40, and we cannot thank them enough.
Learn more about Future40 and how to support.