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Lighting of the Sails: Echo (2024)

by Julia Gutman and Pleasant Company, soundtrack by Angus Mills

24 May – 15 June 2024

Through fantastic and impossible imagery, Australian artist and Archibald Prize winner Julia Gutman with animation technologists, Pleasant Company, conjure an epic animated journey of inner and self-discovery. 

Before you experience the magic of Lighting of the Sails, download your free audio ticket and stream soundtrack by Angus Mills directly to your device.

Truly in the hands of a new generation.

Art Guide Australia

Through the fabric of dreams

With striking, fantastical imagery, Australian artist and Archibald Prize winner Julia Gutman teams up with animation technologists Pleasant Company to conjure an animated journey of self-discovery and wonder. Lighting of the Sails: Echo digitises centuries-old fabric-making techniques, transforming humble textiles that have been donated to the artist from her community into an animated epic projected daily on the Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid LIVE 2024.

Gutman reaches deep into literature and art history, remaking Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus for our contemporary age. After being spurned and rejected by Narcissus, our protagonist appears in a frayed forest of fabrics. In a striped T-shirt, with hair made from her mother’s scarf and a face sewn from an old hessian sack, Echo is lured by her reflection, finding herself transported into unfamiliar terrain, navigating rocky subsoils of satin and dangerous rivers of denim. 

With dance, music and puppetry, Echo tells a story of vulnerability and strength. It is generous and generative, entangling the imagined and the real, the public and the private, the dark and the light - all while imploring self-awareness and self-belief in overcoming the challenges around us. Echo crackles with possibility into a fantasia of fabric on a grand scale.

Commissioned by Sydney Opera House and Destination NSW for Vivid LIVE 2024.

Watch Julia Gutman on Lighting of the Sails: Echo

My first ever animation, Echo is a digital translation of patchworks I’ve made to date alongside a suite of imagery created specifically from the work, all of which have been composed from worn clothing, sheets and blankets donated by my community. The lines between self and other blur. 

The work is about the paradox of self-consciousness, the limitations of our own capacity to truly see ourselves, and the way our own unconscious wounds spill out into our perceptions of one another. It’s a story about confronting your shadow. 

Intimacy lives at the core of my practice. I truly believe that life is just one long conversation, or at least that’s what makes it mean something. Echo brings together my interests in narrative, materiality and the psychological in a story that I hope can be simultaneously personal and universal. 

I’m incredibly overwhelmed and grateful that this work will be projected on the sails of the Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid LIVE 2024.”

- Julia Gutman

Julia Gutman, Head in the sky, feet on the ground (2023), oil paint, found textiles and embroidery on canvas, 198 x 213 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

Meet the artists

Pleasant Company

Pleasant Company is dedicated to pushing the bounds of creativity and technology to deliver unforgettable immersive encounters. With passion and play at the forefront, we redefine engagement to leave a lasting impression on individuals and communities the world over. 

Christian J. Heinrich Creative director
Fabio Nardo ECD
Phil Sullivan CTO
Michelle Schuberg CEO
Andy Noonan, Julian Reinhold Animators
Jasmin Luna Motion Capture Performance
Claudia Osborne Movement Direction 
Ben Freeman, Jack Doepel Musicians

Plan your visit

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