wotwedid

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“… this project keeps growing with wisdom, connection and

heart with every place (and places) that are present

and all who share in it.”

Sound artist  Bree Marchbank.

 

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In March 2026 the Ours for the Making project was presented at two venues: the first, for Beechworth Biennale on the 7–9 of March and the second, at the Shepparton Arts Festival Hub 20–29 March. The following text is edited from project documents written by Tegan Nash Ollett with contributions from team members Bree Marchbank, Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart.

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Ours for the Making is an evolving installation activated through performance and community participation in clay leaf-making sessions. The project was presented as an audio/visual installation. In the final day of each showing was concluded with an improvised live performance. It explores our connection with each other, time, space and the environment. It also acknowledges place as having an active living presence. Featuring hundreds of handmade clay leaves, sound, and visual projections the work is intended to evoke temporal rhythms of growth, decay and renewal that mirror the life histories embedded in natural materials.

 

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THE ARTISTS

The Ours for the Making is a newly formed collective with each of the artists having a long-standing commitment to exploring place as an active, living presence. All four artists live and work in Benalla. Tegan Nash Ollett’s work in performance and community engagement foregrounds artistic practice as a connective, transformative process. Bree Marchbank’s sound works draw from environmental listening and experimental composition while Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart’s photographic, artists book and site-responsive practices examine how landscapes accumulate memory.

Separately, the four artists have received awards and featured in festivals and galleries across Australia, however, each share a strong interest and connection to regional contexts and communities through their work.

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THE CORE INSPIRATION FOR THE PROJECT

Over many years Tegan has work with communities in a process that engages participants in conversation while they worked by hand with potter’s clay to form leaf shapes. She found that people gathering together in this way shared their lived experiences, community’s histories and other personal reflections. Through these sessions the conversations were metaphorically embedded into the leaf objects they made. For her “making is a conduit for connection” and she believes “that through this process, knowledge is not transmitted hierarchically but shared laterally – through material, gesture, and collective experience”.

Following the leaf-making sessions Tegan fires the clay with wood in a fire-pit. Variations in the colour of the clay and occasional ‘blush’ marks and the maker’s fingerprints on the ceramic leaves evidence the story of their making.

Later the ceramic leaves are incorporated into the existing body of leaves created by the Artist (Tegan), allowing the installation’s evolution, with design considerations to reference a response to site. They are the muse for the artists in the development of the full audio-visual installation. The leaves are the centrepiece of the artwork.

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VIDEO PROJECTION IMAGES+SOUND

 

 

Through initial team discussions, five themes/concepts arose as evocative and powerful connections for the leaves with the project. Each of the five themes evoked different expressions of being with/and in Nature. Cooper+Spowart drew from their lived experience traversing landscapes and walking. From this they created visual narratives – montages, for projection, as pathways through each of the five themes.

These five videos were then passed on to Bree who crafted her sound-works to respond to the visual montages.  As Bree states she “approaches sound creation as ritual and collaboration, using improvisation to explore the life cycle of a leaf and our connection to place”.

Viewing of these video works in the installation is enhanced by the fragmentation of the image as it passes over the different suspended ‘veils’ they are, in themselves, individual performative elements, Acts, adding depth and filling the space with imagery.

Together the experience of each animated projection montage with the sound work is deeply layered and form individual elements – Acts, within the installation.

SEE: Bree, Victoria and Doug’s Artist Statements at the end of the Post for deeper insights on process and meaning

 

THE FIVE VIDEOS

Act of Fire

Act of Paralysis: Burnt Banksia

Act of Transformation: Decay and renewal

Act of Fragility: Sunrise

Act of Intimacy: Walking the path

 

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THE INSTALLATION

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In the installation a flow of clay leaves is both architectural and organic. Suspended above are rice-paper veils that catch image projection’s light, shadow, and act like memory skins. The rice paper has been intentionally torn and crumpled to add texture and visual light play. The grouping of leaves suggests concepts of ritual and offering, acknowledging its close relationship to nature, while the veils evoke garments, shrouds, and thresholds.

The sound and image projection animate the space slowly, asking viewers to linger rather than consume. The overall installation invites contemplation of time, care, and the residue of human gesture where gathering becomes an act of devotion and what remains has both material and memory.

 

 

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THE PERFORMANCE

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The one-off live performance is a unique opportunity for attendees to experience the Ours for the Making installation, highlighting the work’s themes through movement, sound and performance. The performance is improvised and features movement by Tegan. Bree activates her instrument’s and sings, at times harmonising with Tegan. In this live performance both respond, through movement and sound, to the sonic and visual rhythms of growth, decay and renewal.

SEE: Tegan’s Artist Statement at the end of the Post for deeper insights on process and meaning

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This YouTube video of the Beechworth Biennale performance by Cooper+Spowart is from a stationary camera position. Its run time is 40 minutes and is best viewed on a larger screen device.

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VICTORIA+DOUG’S REFLECTION ON THE PROJECT

In 2025 we connected with Tegan and her practice in performance and dance. Each month she leads a free ranging improvisation space for community engagement at Benalla Art Gallery called Fresh Juice. At one of these sessions Tegan witnessed Victoria’s exploration of the materiality of rice paper through her crumpling and ripping the sheet then moving it through the air and identified the performative nature of the act.

In a later conversation we learned about her many years of working with community engaging them in conversation while working with clay making leaf shapes. She mentioned that what she had seen at Fresh Juice had inspired her to discuss a collaborative project with us using rice paper, her ceramic leaves and a movement performance.

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Excited by the flow of concepts we set up an experimental installation with Tegan in our studio. We hung veils of rice paper from the ceiling over a large surface covered with her clay leaves. S­tudio lighting was arranged and an animated interpretation of an artists book by Victoria was projected over the scene. We saw potential for the work to be developed further. As Tegan had a strong connection with sound artist Bree Marchbank – she was invited to become the fourth member in this evolving collective project.

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With a successful application for an audio-visual, and sculptural installation engaging community to be developed for the Beechworth Biennale we began to work on the project – that was now entitled Ours for the Making.

From the start this work was developed though the team’s sensory response and reflexive exploration and this continued through to the final installation as a visual, spatial and sonic connection with the site.

After discussions with the Beechworth Biennale we were offered the theatre in The Old Priory. Built in the 1870s the large seating area, stage, dance floor all under an 8-metre ceiling – the site at first seemed challenging. However the installation issues were resolved, and the site was opened for public viewing on March 7 for the duration of the Festival, with a one-off performance taking place on the evening of the 9^th of March.

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Through Tegan’s efforts we also received an offer of a presentation of the installation in The Hub at the Shepparton Art Festival. As a transformed vacant shop it was a totally different space and provided an exciting opportunity to reinterpret the installation and the concluding improvised performance.

 

In Conclusion

For us Ours for the Making has been both an exciting and challenging project. Working within this creative and innovative team was an enriching experience. We can see potential for this project to continue in other spaces – each time, a reimagining.

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Vicky+Doug

April 4, 2026.

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SOME DOCUMENTS OF THE SETTING UP OF THE 2 SPACES

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BEECHWORTH BIENNALE  7-8-9 March 2026 in THE OLD PRIORY (Site 11)

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SHEPPARTON ARTS FESTIVAL  in the Festival HUB  20–29 March

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ARTISTS’ STATEMENTS

TEGAN NASH OLLETT

While developing the ceramic leaf component of the installation, engages deeply with both the conceptual framework of the work and its physical, immersive elements, including space, projection, sound and structure. Nash-Ollett’s movement practice embodies both the visceral and experiential dimensions of the work’s central themes of life cycles and transformation, offering a physical articulation of the body’s encounter with these ideas.

Through improvisation, she responds intuitively to the spatial environment, sonic landscape, projected imagery, and the installation itself, activating the work and foregrounding the body’s relationship to place and its capacity to hold memory. This exploration unfolds through an emotive and physical engagement with life and its cyclical nature. Each cell of the body becomes implicated in this inquiry, as movement transports performer and audience through layered moments of embodiment.

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BREE MARCHBANK

Approaches sound creation as ritual and collaboration, using improvisation to explore the life cycle of a leaf and our connection to place. The sound developed through a devotional practice which included field recordings and attentive listening in community and nature. These recordings capture the living presence of place, with and without instrumentation, creating sonic textures, and relational gestures that invite deeper connection and shared experiences for the audience. The sound reflects repeating patterns that mirror organic processes of emergence and transformation.

For me music begins with deep listening, sitting, feeling and remembering with/and on country. Sounds, song, rhythm, movement, melody and their carriers always ask me to listen with all my essence first. Being invited to collaborate on this project, I was pulled to go and sit with country and listen in deep remembering in different locations that were connected to land, waters and sky of each of the festival sites. From there, sometimes I was invited in to sing and create in song and ritual and other times it was to go home and take in what I had remembered or had to relearn/unlearn and then act accordingly. It is devotional, it is ritual, but it is also humbling and honouring to be able to create music.

I create improvisations for and with my body, my blood, all my ancestors (known and remembering), mother earth, mother universe, all spirit who share this journey with me. This was how I began the listening journey for ‘Ours for the Making’. Then I went into deep listening in collaboration with us as a team, and all the places we brought together, further places upon where deep listening had happened, and with community who shared in story, place, creating together, connecting in and with country.

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VICTORIA COOPER + DOUG SPOWART

For these two artists collaboration is a dynamic space to test and challenge their individual creative practice and explore new and uncharted territory. They are informed by Charles Green’s book The Third Hand, where he proposes that collaboration creates a new entity full of potential and possibilities.

Over time they have recognised that their collaboration with Nature and the non-human has deepened and broadened their perceptions of Being-in-the-world. Their practice of Being is therefore fully engaged with Nature. Here, they loose themselves – corporeality evaporates and the physical space becomes a psychological state where poetic and aesthetic narratives emerge through deep reverie.

 

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IN A FUTURE BLOG POST

In the future we will consider a reflection statement for the project. Currently under development there is a video documentation of the project’s performance at the Shepparton Art Festival which will be made public when complete.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The artists acknowledge the support of Nina Machielse Hunt the BEECHWORTH BIENNALE team, and Gareth Hart the Executive Producer of the SHEPPARTON ART FESTIVAL, Eric Nash and the Benalla Art Gallery. Also families and friends across Victoria, Melbourne and Benalla, who have contributed to the installation through leaf-making sessions, discussions and sharings in the development of the ceramic leaf feature.

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Acknowledgement of Country

The artists also wish to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the various Country locations on which this art project has been made and presented. The artists also acknowledge and pay their respect to the ancestors and Elders – Past, Present and Emerging from these lands and any indigenous people who may attend or read about this presentation.

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The post header photograph is by Tegan Nash Ollett.

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The team photograph is by Gail Neumann.

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The portrait of Victoria + Doug was an assisted self portrait with John Elliott.

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All photographs are by Doug Spowart + Victoria Cooper unless otherwise credited.

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© All Copyrights are retained by all authors.

 

 

 

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PHOTOS WITH CAPTIONS FOLLOW …

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