14 February - 9 MARCH
FELTdark

Amber Cronin
And Now One for the Heavens

And Now One for the Heavens explores how imaginary worlds are created and broken as part of meaning-making and the search for belonging.

Set inside a car a clown methodically builds layers of makeup to complete his costume. The evening light, and the close-up framing capture a ragged melancholy– a quality that has remained part of the clown tradition since the 19th Century. The softened and sentimentalised nature of this short video work portrays an insight to the everyday realities of artists with an intimacy that allows the viewer to step behind the illusory veil.

The slowness and meditative nature of this video work highlights the ritual of transformation that is inherently part of theatre and performance. Playwright, director and theorist, Erik Ehn postulates that the world is imaginary, and therefore art making is creating an imaginary world out of imaginary worlds. “The world of theatre is as phenomenal as the world itself. The world, in order to continue creating, to refresh its meaning, has to constantly break. That is where spirit or God is. It’s in the breaks, the fractures. Meaning – the unknowable thing – is in the moment of breaking.”

Artist Biography

Amber Cronin is a cross-disciplinary artist living and working on Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide, South Australia). Situated amongst an ecology of research that includes sculpture, plants, soil, textiles, sound, video and performance, her practice gathers people, objects and matter in combinations that facilitate meditations on connection and discovery. Developed over extended periods through conversations and collaboration, Cronin’s work collects and expounds on the sensory qualities of everyday actions, reframing them as participatory sites of ritual activity.  Born out of an oscillation between global phenomena and intimate encounters, her recent work finds its genesis in the complex politics of the ecological crisis– art as means of contemplation– as a means of survival, that allows us to enter a shared dimension with ourselves and the more-than-human.