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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. 

Truly in the hands of a new generation.

Art Guide Australia

Through the fabric of dreams

Lighting of the Sails: Echo reaches deep into literature and art history, remaking Roman poet Ovid’s myth of Narcissus for our contemporary age. By digitising centuries-old fabric making techniques, Gutman and Pleasant Company have transformed humble textiles donated to the artist from her community into an animated epic to be projected onto the Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE 2024.

In a frayed forest of fabrics, we meet our central protagonist, a girl with a striped t-shirt, with hair made from her mother’s scarf and a face sewn from an old hessian sack. Lured by her reflection, she’s drawn into a proverbial pool to find herself transported into the unfamiliar, navigating rocky subsoils of satin and dangerous rivers of denim. 

Through dance, music, and puppetry, Echo tells a story of wonder, vulnerability and strength. It is generous and generative, entangling together the imagined and the real, the public and the private, the dark and the light - all while imploring self awareness in meeting our shadows head on. Echo is an invitation that crackles with possibility, into a fantasia of fabric. 

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

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.

Watch Julia Gutman

Watch Julia Gutman on Lighting of the Sails: Echo

Meet the artists

Julia Gutman

Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is anchored by an experimental textile process, with which she interrogates her own relationships and the performance of selfhood. Her figurative works are made primarily from donated fabric – worn clothes, slept-in sheets – and often replicate compositional moments from historical artworks, using her friends as models to respond to and reinvent the originals. Garments often become physical artifacts of the past – stand-ins for those we have lost, or relics of who we once were. Gutman works with the textures of memory, using found textiles as a vehicle for connection and collaboration.

In May 2023, Gutman was awarded the Archibald prize, making her the youngest winner in 85 years. She was one of six exhibiting artists in Primavera at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2022. She was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace Sydney.

Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally in Rome, Milan and New York.

Angus Mills

Angus Mills is a composer, sound designer and electronic music producer from Eora/Sydney. As a composer, his music incorporates textual sound recordings and experimental electronics alongside more traditional musical influences and instrumentation. Since 2017 he has released music on Australian labels Moonshoe, Only Choice, Soothsayer and Local Traffic. In 2023, Angus released ‘Alva’ with Moonshoe, described by Resident Advisor as a 'collection of intricate, outer space rhythmic excursions' that 'beckon you to come closer.' Angus has worked as a composer and sound designer across theatre and film. As a sound designer and composer in theatre, he has worked at venues across Sydney including Belvoir 25A, Red Line at the Old Fitz, and Brand X. Angus' music has been featured on broadcast and digital stations including BBC Radio 6, NTS, Rinse FM, Triple R, Triple J, FBi and Skylab Radio.

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 - CD and Creative Lead - Pleasant Company 
Fabio Nardo - ECD - Pleasant Company 
Phil Sullivan - CTO - Pleasant Company 
Michelle Schuberg - CEO - Pleasant Company

Other information

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