80 Ways
Ella Sowinska
8
June 2020
8
June
2020
12
June 2020
Night Screen
80 Ways is an observational video work documenting the on-set collaboration between Ella Sowinska and her mother as they work together to dramatise a chapter of Sowinska’s mother’s erotic novel, written under the pseudonym Sandy Mayflower. Both Sowinska and Thea Jones actively engage with their mother’s creative practices for this exhibition. Sowinska’s film, 80 Ways, is an observational video work documenting the on-set collaboration between the artist and her mother as they work together to dramatise a chapter of Sowinska’s mother’s erotic novel, written under the pseudonym Sandy Mayflower. Jones’ new work is a large scale textile installation responding to an essay written by her mother. In 2017, Jones approached her mother to write an essay to accompany a work exploring nostalgia as a coping mechanism for trauma. Hoping for a scathing review of family farm dynamics and conservative racist rural politics, she instead received a touching story about death, loss, and the function of nostalgia. This new work is hand embroidered with an excerpt of text from her mother’s essay, as well as the motif of the Paterson’s Curse invasive weed. Paterson’s Curse covers the landscape surrounding Thea’s mother’s childhood home with a blanket of purple flowers. It has been an ongoing theme in Jones’s recent works as a representational motif for European colonisation, and a subsequent critical investigation and deconstruction of her own role in this as a white woman.
80 Ways is an observational video work documenting the on-set collaboration between Ella Sowinska and her mother as they work together to dramatise a chapter of Sowinska’s mother’s erotic novel, written under the pseudonym Sandy Mayflower. Both Sowinska and Thea Jones actively engage with their mother’s creative practices for this exhibition. Sowinska’s film, 80 Ways, is an observational video work documenting the on-set collaboration between the artist and her mother as they work together to dramatise a chapter of Sowinska’s mother’s erotic novel, written under the pseudonym Sandy Mayflower. Jones’ new work is a large scale textile installation responding to an essay written by her mother. In 2017, Jones approached her mother to write an essay to accompany a work exploring nostalgia as a coping mechanism for trauma. Hoping for a scathing review of family farm dynamics and conservative racist rural politics, she instead received a touching story about death, loss, and the function of nostalgia. This new work is hand embroidered with an excerpt of text from her mother’s essay, as well as the motif of the Paterson’s Curse invasive weed. Paterson’s Curse covers the landscape surrounding Thea’s mother’s childhood home with a blanket of purple flowers. It has been an ongoing theme in Jones’s recent works as a representational motif for European colonisation, and a subsequent critical investigation and deconstruction of her own role in this as a white woman.
Ella Sowinska
Ella Sowinska is an artist and filmmaker whose work is guided by the theoretical discourses of documentary and reality television. Ella addresses the impact that the constructed situation has upon these social relationships, and explores the power dynamics between director or artist and actor, participant or contestant by drawing attention to the often-constructed situation. Working predominantly in video, installation and occasionally, live performance, Ella's work is critical of the voyeurism inherent in the documentation of the private and intimate lives of others. Recent projects have been concerned with the representation of intimacy and desire in non-fiction screen based works from a queer perspective. Ella's work has been included in the Mildura Palimpsest Biennial, as well as recent exhibitions at TCB, The Honeymoon Suite, Metro Arts and The Centre for Contemporary Photography. Ella’s film ‘80 Ways’ was exhibited on the online platform ‘Recess’ in 2018, and received a positive review by MEMO in their recent ‘Best and overlooked of 2018’ segment. Ella's graduating film Pretty Gross and Incredibly Intimate won the Best Documentary award at the VCA graduate awards in 2018.