Jen lyons-reid and carl kuddell

Jen Lyons-Reid, _this breath artistic director, co-writer and lead artist, brings 20+ years experience as a CACD leader, director, filmmaker, web + game designer, cartoonist, visual artist, feminist and educator. She co-leads workshop facilitation and creative direction, and contributes her drawing and design skills for provocative memes, props, mis-directions, tactical games and creative challenges. Jen was awarded the prestigious 2-year Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship in 2015, to explore power and privilege in CACD.

Carl Kuddell, _this breath creative producer, radical philosopher-poet and co-writer, ensures everything runs smoothly while wrangling the inevitable chaos. Besides his media and CACD work with Jen, he brings a range of skills across film production, performance, sculpture, installation and site-specific projections to the work. Carl is an experienced facilitator of difficult conversations and non-violent conflict, honed in years of living  and working in subcultures in Europe. His focus on privilege aims to create a caring, safe space for creative, collaborative risk-taking.

Find out more about us here: https://tallstoreez.com/

Clyde Rigney Jnr

Clyde Rigney Jnr, director Ngarrindjeri Namawi Consulting, is a Ngarrindjeri man, writer, cultural awareness educator and former CEO of the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority, the peak representative body of the Ngarrindjeri nation. A long-term Change Media collaborator, Clyde co-produced the Ngarrindjeri Culture Hub and 8-part award-winning ABC iView series Ngarrindjeri Shorts. His work builds on two well received installations at the South Coast Regional Arts Centre 2019 and Murray Bridge Gallery 2018 and a presentation at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.

https://www.ngarrindjeri-culture.org/artists#/clyde-rigney-jnr

Click here to visit: What Privilege - The Colony

Click here to visit: What Privilege - The Colony - dare to stop us

Lyn Lovegrove Niemz

Lyn Lovegrove Niemz, painter and ceramicist, is a Ngarrindjeri mimini (woman) with strong links to her family and culture. Her father was born on Raukkan, her Great-great-grandmother was Louise Karpany (also known as Queen Louise of the Ngarrindjeri). Lyn is interested in experimenting with discarded objects in her sculptural work.

Her exhibitions and awards include the Watershed Art Prize 2019, OurMob at Tandanya Aboriginal Culture Centre (2008-10), Spirit Festival 2010, John Harvey Gallery, Marra Dreaming, merit award at the York Peninsula Exhibition 2010, Campbelltown Council Exhibition first prize 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014-17) and many group and solo shows across SA.

“This is an exciting, thought provoking project, it makes me want to put my heart and soul into it, it touches me on many levels, expresses what I know in my heart. I think this could grow into a whole new movement, to move people emotionally, opening minds to subjects that are almost too taboo to express”.

https://www.ngarrindjeri-culture.org/artists#/lyn-lovegrove-niemz

Cedric Varcoe

Cedric Varcoe is a Ngarrindjeri-Narangga multidisciplinary artist. Cedric draws on his cultural heritage to create woven works and paintings. Winner Don Dunston Award 2019 for Emerging Aboriginal Artists, his playful designs featuring his signature Ngarrindjeri Men are shown and collected nationally and globally. He has collaborated with Change Media since 2017. “Through this project I want to talk about the colonial damage that continues to impact on my community”.

https://www.ngarrindjeri-culture.org/artists#/cedric-varcoe

https://whatprivilege.net/create-blog/the-colony-dare-to-stop-us

Kathryn Pentecost

Kathryn Pentecost (aka KP van der Poel)

Kathryn is best known as a playwright/ producer, arts critic, artist and scholar. From 2015 until 2020, she was Artistic Director of Sealand Theatre Inc. She has been writing poetry for many years, and in 2018 produced Metamorphosis – a poetry event at Yankalilla Library, showcasing the work of three female poets. In the late 1980s, she was part of the Writers Aloft collective in Sydney.

Kathryn’s engagement with _this breath is not mine to keep arises out of a need to express some of the darker, more challenging aspects of her psychological engagement with the world – aspects that may resonate with viewers/readers as they struggle with the conditions of neo-conservative capitalism, environmental degradation, the tense and constraining aspects of life under Covid-19, and the stagnant and/or oppressive political status quo here and elsewhere.

Her first solo anthology of poetry is called Metamorphosis.

The hard cover of Metamorphosis was published in 2021; a softcover in 2023.

KP van der Poel is a pseudonym that connects back to her maternal ancestors whom she has written about in her PhD thesis. Read more at Kathryn Pentecost website

Find her poetry for _this breath here (video edited by Sam Herzog, using copyright-free stock footage sourced from pexels.com. All rights reserved Kathryn Pentecost 2020.):

Johanis Lyons-Reid

Johanis Lyons-Reid

Johanis Lyons-Reid is an award-winning Malaysian-Australian filmmaker from Adelaide, South Australia. Johanis has worked in multiple roles in the filmmaking process, including as a director, cinematographer and editor. He has worked on television commercials, documentaries (The Loop, SBS, 2019; Deadly Family Portraits, ABC iview, 2019; Everything is Connected, iView, 2017; Speaking for Sea Country, ABC iView, 2018) and shot freelance for various agencies and channels including SBS and Vice. Johanis has a strong foundation and interest in the Arts and documentary, and looks to balance his commercial practice with a dedicated exploration of his creative and artistic expression. Johanis’ directorial debut married his love of screen and arts in short documentaries that followed Ngarrindjeri Elders and their traditional arts practice (Everything is Connected, 2016, Winner best Australian Non-Fiction at the Melbourne Webfest 2016). During his formative years as a cinematographer he worked for community arts stalwart Change Media on national projects funded by Australia Council for the Arts, Country Arts SA and Arts South Australia, including When Does the Light Turn on? (2013), and Reframing Culture (2012). These projects affirmed for him the importance of storytelling and art in changing cultural discourse.

johanislr.com

mike riddle

Mike Riddle

Mike Riddle scratched and scribbled poetry, plays and children’s books across schools and communities in country South Australia for nearly forty years, producing works which ranged from quirky word play to black humour to being compassionate and purposeful. Since retiring in Goolwa in 2016, overcoming the relative isolation of the past, he has appreciated the opportunity to immerse himself in an active and extensive arts community. He reads at Poetry on the Fleurieu and is a member of the Ochre Coast Poets.

Inspired and enthralled by 2019’s thought-provoking ‘The Colony – Dare to stop us’, Mike’s recent writing has assumed a greater political and social commentary focus. He is elated and humbled to collaborate with Change Media and contribute to _this breath is not mine to keep.

Doll Yoko

Doll yoko aka Francesca da Rimini

Dr Francesca da Rimini (she/her) lives and works on Kaurna land in South Australia. She is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and performer who also works as a precarious academic researcher. Her literary and performative art practice oscillates between solo and collaborative work. Paying careful attention to visual style and language, the works play with identity in-flux, location and knowledge-making. In 1999 Francesca da Rimini was awarded an Australia Council New Media Fellowship. She has made numerous online and installation artworks that explore madness, gender, sexuality, power and the prophetic voice, including the international award-winning dollspace. She collaborates with VNS Matrix (1991 ongoing), intercontinental art group identity_runners (1999 ongoing), Bodyweather dance company deQuincy Co (2000-2007), Mongrel/Harwood’s Netmonster (Perth 2005), Bumpp Projects/Sydney Roller Derby League’s Bloodbath (Sydney 2010), Shu Lea Cheang’s Moving Forest (London 2012), Hexecutable II for Beyond The Interface (London 2015), and In Her Interior’s (with Virginia Barratt) Tender Alembician’s Suite (New York 2019). da Rimini’s installation Lips becoming beaks (12,000 nautical leagues) and performance (tongues of quickened silver) was locally researched with birdwatchers and Boandik elder Ken Jones for the Women at Work show (Mt Gambier 2017). Current projects include Open Sorcery Poetry with identity_runners, and Tell me what you see outside with In Her Interior. Francesca was inspired by the social and ecological urgency of the themes driving _this breath, and the opportunity to have poetry live outside its normal confines.

http://idrunners.net/

http://www.inherinterior.net/projects/refresh/

Nigel Ford

Nigel Ford

Nigel Ford is an active social and political commentator on social media who discovered a passion for poetry at age 50. He has been the Regional Rep for Friendly Street Poets since 2013 and Convenor since 2017. He founded the Poetry On The Fleurieu monthly readings and the annual Goolwa Poetry Cup. Nigel has won several poetry slams, including the 2015 Darwin Poetry Cup & the 2012 Australian Poetry Festival Slam, has featured at poetry events in SA, NT, Vic & Qld, been published in anthologies in SA, NT & Qld and has judged and edited competitions and anthologies, including Friendly Street Poets latest Anthology No 44.
Nigel became involved in the “This Breath Is Not Ours To Keep” project, because the theme of Supremacy inspires the anarchist in him and remaining silent is not something that sits comfortably in his soul.

In Her Interior

In Her Interior (Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt)

In 2015 Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini formed In Her Interior (IHI) to co-create and perform live works of spoken/sung and recorded text and video within site-specific installation environments. As an unfaithful follower of constraint-based experimentation across various art traditions, IHI’s work often involves accomplices – local land custodians, sound artists, birdwatchers, writers, philosophers, gleaners. To date IHI has performed in galleries, dedicated performance spaces, repurposed industrial settings, academic environments, and theatres—in Helsingør, London, Berlin, New York, Adelaide, Byron Bay, Sydney and Melbourne. Collaborations include B.A.B.S., The Darkening: Language lined with flesh lined with language, Songs for Skinwalking the Drone (a commissioned libretto), Hexing the Alien, echolalia: golden iterations, The Tender Alembicians Suite and a mouth swallowing the storm. As two of the four co-founders of cyberfeminist group VNS Matrix (est. 1991), da Rimini and Barratt have contributed to global critiques of gender and technology across three decades. In 2016, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, VNS Matrix wrote and performed a new text, A Tender Hex for the Anthropocene.

The themes driving the _this breath project resonated strongly with subject matter that IHI have been exploring collectively and individually over many years. _this breath inspired us to inhale deeply and craft a new poem through a process of collage and enabling restraints. “Publishing” the poem as a shopfront installation reframes the work in the tradition of Gene Youngblood’s expanded cinema, a seminal text which informs our process.

Emilijia Kasumovic

Emilijia Kasumovic

Emilija Kasumovic is an Adelaide based artist working within drawing, sculpture and installation practice. She is fascinated by the modes of knowledge through which we come to understand our reality and place in the world, specifically relating to scientific and eastern philosophical theories concerning space and matter. Emilija constantly questions the relationship between internal and external, mind and matter, immaterial and material, and seeks the point where these seeming opposites merge. Embracing the new materialism theory, Emilija believes that matter has a life force and expression of its own which the artist is in co-creation with. Materials contain energy and have emergent properties, playing an active role in the creation of their own forms.

Being deeply interested and curious about the way we interact and engage with the world, Emilija found _this breath is not mine to keep as a platform through which contemporary issues such as cultural and social differences and environment we inhabit can be reconsidered, altered and questioned. Through almost invisible, but deeply sensory and affective materials, she searches for a potential where energy, space and matter become one with our bodies, thus connecting us to each other and the world.

Emilijia’s work has been included in several group exhibitions, most recently at Nexus Arts as part of Change Media’s ‘Unity of Oppression’ 2018 and ‘The Colony - dare to stop us’ at the South Coast Regional Arts Centre 2019. She was the recipient of Nexus Arts’ Artist in Residence program in 2019.

Click here for our 2018 collaboration with Emilijia Kasumovic.

Visit her site here: https://emilijakasumovic.wixsite.com/visualartist

Niyati Libotte

Niyati Libotte

Niyati Libotte is a multimedia storyteller, activist and yogini based in Sydney. Through song, word, performance and film, she works towards connection, inclusion, environmental and social betterment.

Felix Weber

Felix Weber

Felix Weber, WOMAD 2018-2021 site manager, is a tech, music and installation wizard. A long-term Change Media collaborator, Felix delivered digital media workshops in communities across Australia. His recent work include site-specific installation, sculptural works and mapped video projections for the Adelaide Fringe and several large-scale events. He has access to loads of toys and is not afraid to use them.
I have been described as a jack of all trades, generalist and a polymath. The strength of my work does not come from specialisation, but rather a broad range of skills and eclectic knowledge. Driven by an insatiable desire to learn new skills and to constantly experiment with different mediums, I am most comfortable pushing boundaries and exploring new ideas.

I started my creative career in the digital space with 3D modelling, image manipulation and animation. Whilst this space was technically limitless I eventually found myself wanting to create more than just digital images. Creating tangible and tactile work drove me to start building, using carpentry, welding and CNC fabrication.

The collaborations on ‘_this breath is not mine to keep’ offered me several opportunities to combine multiple skills and mediums across sculpture and installation.

Instagram ID: Polymath.idc

Visit our 2019 collaboration with Felix Weber here

Wallace McKitrick

Wallace McKitrick

Discovering breath-based meditation began an appreciation of the intimate relationship between our inner cosmos and the outer. This helped me to be honest about the damage humans are causing to world survival systems. The sanest responses combine social equity principles with a deep understanding that interconnected life has no boundaries. These responses challenge a macabre, suicidal economy based on 'profit at all costs' and its companions poverty, oppression, brutality, starvation.

The _this breath project is a bold contribution to values and creative conversation that can save our 'nest': the biosphere that formed us and to which we return. I'm grateful to its founders and glad to be with the other artists.

Helen Kelly

Helen Kelly

Visual artist, producer, grandmother, researcher, human.

My Mum and I are working on a series of three textile pieces exploring the concept of ‘enough’. Mum isn’t particularly interested in the political nature of the work and she just wants to support me. ‘I don’t really understand any of that but I’m happy to knit the squares’ is her statement. And mine is – the work! And it so happens to fit beautifully with the collaboration of _this breath.  Mum – Clare Bradley Kelly - is 93 and in a high care unit in a nursing home in country Victoria and I am on an extended visit (due to covid 19 restrictions) to Victoria from the NT.

I primarily live in Virginia just out of Darwin, and am currently undertaking a Masters Degree by Research at the Charles Darwin University exploring art works connected to place.

www.unqualfied.com.au

Stephen House

Stephen house

Stephen House is an award winning playwright, poet and actor. He’s won two Awgie Awards (Australian Writer’s Guild), an Adelaide Fringe Award, Rhonda Jancovich Poetry Award for Social Justice, Goolwa Poetry Cup, Feast Short Story Prize and more. He’s been shortlisted for Lane Cove Literary Award, Overland’s Fair Australia Fiction Prize, Patrick White Playwright and Queensland Premier Drama Awards, a Greenroom acting Award and more. He’s received Australia Council literature residencies to Ireland and Canada, an India Asialink literature residency, and a Tasmanian Writer’s residency.  

“I’m a nomad and travel widely most of the time (until COVID); usually writing and performing as I go. Poetry, monologue, performance and the combination of all have been my main art-forms the last decade. When I saw “this breath is not mine to keep” call out, it grabbed me. The brief made me reflect on the current state of the planet, future, fragility of nature; and how much is in our control and how much isn’t. Questions about the planet’s survival and the uneasy chaos residing in our now lead me to write my poem, “over-kill”.

Find his poetry for _this breath here:

Donna Edwards

Donna Edwards

Donna Edwards is an award winning poet, writer and world traveller. Her first poetry book Idle Fragments was produced by Ginninderra Press, a renowned South Australian publisher.   A number of her poems feature in Anthologies, including Mountain Secrets, I Protest! - Poems of Dissent and Frances Folk Gathering Platinum Poems. Several of her poems have been studied in advanced English classes. Foremost a poet at heart she has also written children stories and a screenplay.
Donna lives in Marion Bay SA with her husband, has two grown up sons and volunteers with the Country Fire Service and the Friends of Innes National Park.  She is also a keen walker and bird watcher.

I was inspired to engage with this breath  as it resonated with my strong conviction and commitment to social justice. I have a tiny voice in a world completely overloaded with noise and information.  I view Art & Poetry as the perfect medium to rise above the din and work with others to inspire change for the better.

Deborah Prior

Deborah Prior is an early career artist. Her art practice navigates the complexities and pleasures of being and having a body through time-consuming, contemplative craft practices and endurance performance works. Working primarily with salvaged domestic textiles, Deborah crafts objects and actions that consider bodily agency, Feminist modes of production, and the personal and social histories of Domestic work. Most recently she has been investigating the shared visual language of body fragments in medical imaging and religious iconography – creating profane relics that play upon the cultural unease surrounding corporeal bodies.

Prior completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2006, and a PhD at the University of South Australia in 2014. She has exhibited at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, SASA Gallery, Adelaide City Council Art Pod, FELTspace, CACSA’s Project Space, Seedling Art Space, Adelaide Central Gallery, Trocadero Art Space (Melbourne), Rubicon Ari (Melbourne), and Kings Artist Run (Melbourne). She is a past alumni of the Guildhouse Collections Project (SA) and was the 2016 recipient of the Helpmann Academy British School at Rome Residency. In August 2019 she was Artist in Residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (Melbourne). Deborah has also lived with chronic illness[es] for over 20 years and has more recently decided she is too tired to pretend otherwise.

https://guildhouse.org.au/deborah-prior/

Piri Eddy

Piri Eddy

Piri is an award winning playwright, writer and multi-media producer based in South Australia. He won the 2020 Jill Blewett Playwrights Award for his play Forgiveness. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in such places as Westerly, Island Magazine and Radio National.

He worked as co-writer and producer with Johanis Lyons-Reid on cycles for _this breath, and is currently producing the absurdist magic realism short film The Last Elephant on Earth, funded through the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival.

www.tallstoreez.com/project/the-last-elephant-on-earth

Jamila Main

Jamila Main

Jamila Main is a trained actor and self-taught, award-winning playwright living and working on unceded Peramangk and Kaurna land in SA. A graduate of the Adelaide College of the Arts Acting program (2018), Jamila works across stage and screen, most recently presenting a showing of their autobiographical, durational theatre work How Long Can This Last? at Vitalstatistix with dramaturg Emma Valente which had an online, global audience of over 600 people. Jamila’s final role pre-Covid was telling Leen’s story in Mohammed Al Attar’s acclaimed Aleppo. A Portrait of Absence in the Adelaide Festival. During Lockdown Jamila performed a livestreamed reading of their latest play How to Eat Rabbit alongside actor Audrey Mason-Hyde.

Jamila is currently working on various screen projects yet to be announced, writing new plays, and is an advisor on the National Advisory Panel (Playwriting Australia and Australian Plays), a Carclew Fellow, Co-Chair of the Equity Diversity Committee, Youth Advisor at ATYP, and a participant in the Midsumma Pathways Program for queer and disabled artists.

www.actnowtheatre.org.au/artist-jamilamain

Justin Pounsett

Justin Pounsett​, founder of The Audio Embassy, is one of the most diverse and thoughtful media composers in his field. His knowledge, skill and interest in all musical genres is why Justin had been consistently awarded for his music, over his 15-year career. Justin prides himself in trying to constantly push creative boundaries, explaining why it’s so important to think outside the box and harness one of - if not the most - influential and impactful artforms. He tirelessly tries to impart his musical knowledge and passion to clients and his audience, to see the endless opportunities that music offers and are yet to be explored. Justin has studied Music Composition at the prestigious Berklee College of Music.

His work complements advertising and communications material for some of the World’s best-loved brands, including Arnott’s, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Disney and Jacobs Creek. His love of music and sound has resulted in numerous industry accolades and Advertising & Design Club Awards. Supporting a growing list of TV and Film credits including music for Mcleods Daughters and music and sound for the AACTA nominated short film The Moment.

An accomplished piano player and multi-instrumentalist, Justin plays regularly in the local Adelaide music scene for numerous original and cover bands.

www.theaudioembassy.com.au

Emma Hough Hobbs

Emma Hough Hobbs

Emma Hough Hobbs (BCreatArts(DigitalMedia) 2018) is a queer artist and film graduate from Flinders University, receiving the Chancellor’s Letter of Commendation 2017.

She’s an emerging designer, animator and filmmaker who is a vibrant and passionate member of the SA film industry. Emma was awarded Young Inspirational Filmmaker at the 2018 Fleurieu Film Festival.

Last year she was nominated twice for Best Production Design at the SASA Awards. She has worked on TV shows including Tim Minchin’s Foxtel series Upright and Anna Kokkinos’ SBS series The Hunting.

Her work as an animator has led to collaborations with Madeleine Parry (director of Hannah Gadsby’s Nannette) and inclusion in the international animation project Loop De Loop. Emma also wrote and directed the SASA nominated animated short Umi.

Launched in April this year, SA’s new Hanlon Larsen Screen Fellowship funds an experimental film project with production and in-kind support of $35,000 in partnership with Flinders University and Mercury CX.

Geoffrey Aitken

Geoffrey Aitken

Geoffrey Aitken is an emerging award-winning South Australian “New Poet” whose minimalist industrial signature sees him published both locally and internationally (AUS, UK, US & Fr). He is different enough to be older than he should be but young enough in his hometown poetry scene to appeal to readers who encourage him. He passionately records his observations of struggle and injustice for supporters’ intimate sharing or private contemplation but writes without aids; he does not test poetry on caged animals, nor is he after dinner suburban congeniality. 

Thirty years in education after graduating as a mature aged Senior English teacher saw me working with public school students before delivering Vocational Training to Indigenous adults in central Australia, prompting a writing focus that announces disadvantage to audiences whenever publication allows. As happens the opportunity presented by “this breath is not mine to keep” has invited some harder edged expression struck against contemporary living/lifestyles. Grateful whenever my poetry reaches others this exhibition should be welcome news to many who understand the crossroad humans have reached.

David Cookson

David Cookson

David Cookson’s Victor Harbor friends prompted him to have a go at this project.

 David is a born and bred South Australian who has been writing fiction and poetry for more years than he cares to remember, but to give you a clue, he can remember a time when 'virgin' wasn’t an airline. He usually writes about nature, people and human irony in an imagist style with much use of metaphor and simile and is a great admirer of Japanese poetry, especially the shorter, quite disciplined forms. His work features in many Friendly Street anthologies as well as publications in Australia and overseas.

He lives at Moana with his wife Veronica and an ever-diminishing cellar of red wine.

Rory Harris

Rory Harris

Rory Harris is a poet & teacher. He currently teaches at Playford College in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. His most recent collection is beach (2016).

From the late 1970s funding from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for poet-in-residences in local & country schools. Toured with the Australian Performing Group’s Mobile Poetry Workshop through Victoria (1979). Funding from The Australian Schools Commission, Arts Grants Advisory Committee, Youth Performing Arts (Carclew) & Arts SA for various projects including yearlong residencies at Woodville HS (1981) & Elizabeth West Schools (1983).  Co-wrote with Peter McFarlane a series of poetry text books for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and Macmillan Education Australia.  His radio dramas have been broadcast on National Radio Solomon Islands.

Heather Taylor-Johnson

Heather Taylor-Johnson

Wether it’s the death of a friend or another death in custody or the quickening death of our coral reefs, writing poetry about what’s heavy on my mind doesn’t cleanse the hurt and frustration for me, but it assists me in moving forward. I began practicing the ‘personal as political’ when I started to write about living with chronic illness, working through my own issues while advocating for a large group of people who make up what Arthur Frank calls our Remission Society. The power to speak beyond myself was not only detrimental to my emotional well-being at the time, but it gave me a sense of purpose, ‘purpose’ being something every artist questions at some point in their professional lives, if not all through their professional lives. I’ve since embraced the concept of purpose to include speaking against tyranny, sexism, guns and environmental rapists – being American-Australian, I have a lot to consider. I wrote "Man & Man, Man & Ape, Ape & Ape & Women" in response to JM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, a book that champions a rejection of capitalism, which is essentially, seemingly, impossible. Even books and art play a role in capitalism, even the writer and the artist, so how can we begin to imagine what our world would look like without it? This poem does not offer that view, rather it focuses on the absurdity of our obsession with it. Prioritising our connection to nature and to one another, however, is a good place to begin if we want to move beyond it.

Nick Carroll

Raymond Nicholas (Nick) Carroll 

BA Hons Contemp. Dance (London); Dip Tch Secondary (New Zealand); Masters Soc Sci – Counselling (Uni SA Australia).

Born in Southern New Zealand just after the war, Nick Carroll, enjoyed an outdoor rural childhood before becoming stage struck in his mid-teens. This led to a life-long career in dance and theatre, performing, teaching, and creating in many parts of the world and in numerous capacities. On retirement he took up writing and in 2018 self-published a Memoir called “Is There Something Wrong with Me?” - a ‘coming of age’ story. He has also written poems, short stories (one published in a local anthology), autobiographical stories, articles, doggerel, and a few angry letters to newspapers.

Nick was attracted to ‘this breath…’by its off-beat originality in a world where perhaps the only thing that might save us from self-inflicted demise is ‘imagination’.  

www.nickcarrollmindbody.com.au

Kym Holly

Kym Holly

Generations of my family have lived on the Fleurieu Peninsula since 1840s and coming from this beautiful area includes acceptance of change. I have seen the land and waters being transformed by the expansion of humanity’s domain both here and in the wider world.
Born of the land and lost to the sea would best describe my life, I have spent over 40 years working on the ocean and witnessing the forces of nature and the many moods of the sea. Moving between society and a life at sea has allowed me to spend time reflecting and contemplating what is happening to our planet and humanity.

I have found the collaboration of ‘this breath is not mine to keep’ exciting and touches me on many levels, it expresses what I feel and inspired me to submit Drawing the Line.
The 10 components of the Bunker Rulz covers what our community is facing and feeling in these trying and ever changing times.

It brings the arts and the community together and is a great way to move us spiritually, emotionally and highlights issues through art and creativity instead of through indoctrination which only causes people unwarranted guilt.
It is a thought provoking concept and hopefully opens people’s minds to subjects through a visual arts movement.

Avalanche

Avalanche

I was literally born on an island in the middle of a river in the middle of a medieval city in the middle of Europe in the middle of the last century. The island was the hideout of mountebanks and various disturbers of the peace, then it became the king’s very own hunting-ground, and then they built a bridge and it became a fairground, and they built a maternity hospital there as well. Now there’s a tennis-court where the likes of Lendl used to train.

My ancestors feature various interesting folk, tricksters and gypsies, performers and jesters…some well outside the system, others working it from within.

I miss the old city, and one day will go back and visit her.

It’s always about love, one way or another.
Avalanche.