Support PSpace to keep artists thriving... Creating in Quarantine with Emily Parsons-Lord
As restrictions across the country ease and our communities begin to reopen, many of us have begun to think about what the future will look like. Looking at the ways our lives have shifted and changed during this time, and how this can inform the way we move forward.
Performance Space is championing artists as thought leaders and visionaries, as they examen, adapt and reinterpret. Through this we have commissioned a series of self portrait’s Creating in Quarantine, to support and showcase the ways artists are adapting and exploring their practice through these uncertain times.
We launched the Creating in Quarantine series last week with a beautiful portrait and statement by Daniel Kok; our second artist to feature as part of this series is Emily Parsons-Lord.
"I have been working in my home studio since the beginning of the year, when the smoke from the bushfires turned the air yellow. 2020 reveals our invisible maligned: compounding years of climate catastrophe; our vulnerable biologies; the economic precarity of art. My artistic obsession with air connects these events and brings them into focus when I work in my studio. What is a local bubble when our collective imagining expands past the bounds of the planet, and our physical engagement with materials circumnavigates the earth? Materials that catch the Qantas trans-Atlantic, passing invisibly from human to human like a sinister handshake. We fear the air that sustains us, and the connections that excite us.
I think artists are used too often working in solitude, the social distancing and isolation of our current moment both amplifies and restricts my processes. But it is the economic anxiety that destabilised me. I have taken a cash-in-hand job as a carer for an older lady to defend against a bad landlord. It's through working with her that I feel most exposed and yet most connected to the wider community. I am making a series of works on paper that consider the suburban sublime urge to connect to bigger things in the universe."
Emily Parsons-Lord
Your support this year will enable PSpace to:
• Support artists to experiment and creatively develop their work through the various stages of lockdown.
• Develop arts experiences that will bring our community together as soon as it is safe to do so: including a radical reimagining of our 2020 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art.
• Adapt our programs and create new initiatives that enable art to thrive throughout this strange and unpredictable time.
While our artists invent new ways to work and dream, we are right by their side, creating support structures and leaning in, as we have been for 35 years.
Please support us to ensure Artists can continue to live, work and flourish through the chaos of these times.
When the virus breaks, we’re going to share this work with you. It will be beautiful, surprising and new. And we will have come through it together.
