It is, what it is.

I believe that God works in mysterious ways. Countless times over the last six years I have cried myself to sleep hoping, praying, yearning for the man I loved and I to find a way to be together and to create a future together. Last year, after we parted at Verona in Italy, the days that followed were etched in a blurry haze of tears, grief and darkness. I couldn't make sense of anything. I thought my prayers and intentions had been misplaced and I couldn't understand how there could be another way forward.

For the first time since we met, for over 12 months we have not exchanged a word. Then out-of-the-blue, I recently received an unexpected email from him. It was nonchalant, non-maleficent, non-committal and devoid of any affection and charm. He wrote that he would like to travel to Australia and New Zealand next Summer and suggested that I may like to join him. 

In the days that followed emotions varied, peaked and finally plateaued. 

Initially I was bewildered by his email, then surprised by the absence of any remorse or reference to our last time together, next I slide into fantastical imaginings of seeing him again and what I'd wear, and then finally once I had recouped the memories and sensations of our last time together, my response became very clear. I no longer love or trust him and so there is nothing for me to gain by seeing him again. 

It has taken me a long time to come to this realisation, and it is without regret, bitterness, sadness or any emotion. It is simply what I believe now to be the truth.

Cherry Tree Lane

Gay Gough Theatre at Mt Clear College

Cherry Tree Lane: the Mary Poppins Story has been written by Curtain Call Performing Arts Studios owner Lindy Procaccino. Acacia was one of the most beautiful actors in the group and it was a real thrill to go to be present to watch her perform. 

Inspiring story line, in particular the chorus "Try to defy gravity, so to be able to fly"

A Kind of Fabulous Hatred

A Kind of Fabulous HatredBy Barry Dickins, Directed by Laurence Strangio

A one-woman fantasy about Sylvia Plath, performed by Caroline Lee.

A Kind of Fabulous Hatred by Barry Dickins is a new Australian work: beautifully written, surprising, and darkly humorous. Set on the night of the poet Sylvia Plath’s suicide, A Kind of Fabulous Hatred is a complex, insightful and often very funny portrait of a mind in turmoil. The poet is presented as a figure in thrall to language and meaning – weaving it, flitting across it, riffing on it, avoiding it.

Language is her salvation and her release – it is also her entrapment: the clock ticks away her final moments while the storm rages outside and in.

Lee and Strangio “invite audiences into unfamiliar landscapes where we may experience new ways of seeing, examine the fissures and fractures of our own inner lives, and chart the seldom mapped interiority of strangers.”  - Peta Murray, Playwright.

Winner of RE Ross Trust Scriptwriting Award 2011.

'The Last Day at Giverny' Monet's Garden, NGV

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is a French artist and composer who creates large-scale acoustic installations and environments which draw upon forces of nature and the rhythms of everyday life to produce new forms of art and music. 

With clinamen 2013, white porcelain bowls float upon an intensely blue pool. Circulating gently, swept along by submarine currents, floating crockery acts as percussive instruments, creating a resonant, chiming acoustic soundscape, marked by complexity, hidden patterns and chance compositions. In its unification of colour, sound and space, clinamen encourages a form of multi-sensory or ‘synaesthetic’ engagement with the work of art. 

Working in a tradition established by American composer John Cage, Boursier-Mougenot’s installation promotes chance and indeterminacy in musical composition, as well as the use of unorthodox musical instruments.

Sound Bites City

The inaugural exhibition of RMIT University's new Sound Art Collection.

Sound Bites City will showcase the new RMIT University Sound Art Collection - the first of its kind in Australia – and offer audiences the chance to experience 19 new and significant works by leading Australian and international sound artists.

The exhibition takes place in the Torus - an exciting circular structure that has been specially designed by architects, engineers and sound designers based in RMIT's SIAL unit to provide the best way to exhibit sound.

The Torus will take up the entire main gallery, with overlapping 'boughs' of red cedar forming a canopy around a thin fabric skin - it will be an airy shell, a sonic tunnel, a pioneering spacio-acoustic marvel constructed by RMIT architecture and design students.

The immersive sounds experienced inside the Torus will introduce audiences to works especially commissioned by, or acquired from, artists from Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, US, and France.

Visitors are invited to stroll through a 16 channel speaker system, finishing on a raised mini landscape where they can relax on the faux lawn while enjoying the best aural vantage point to hear the works.

Audiences will also have the opportunity to browse through any part of the Collection on headphones, and to watch the composition of a work in progress.

A unique addition to Australian culture, this is the first dedicated sound art collection in an Australian university. For over two years RMIT Gallery has worked closely with sound and design researchers at the University to select the inaugural works and develop an exhibition platform for spatial electroacoustic sound works.

The Collection includes 2010 Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz’s We’ll All Go Together, leading Australian sound artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s Sydney Olympic Park Commission 5000 Calls, and the pioneering Bill Fontana’s KirribilliWharf.

There will also be scheduled performances of work by Steve Stelios Adam, Philip Brophy, Christophe Charles, Bill Fontana, Katrin Isabel Ernst, Susan Frykberg, Christine Groult, Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, Nick Murray and Carl Anderson, Susan Philipsz, Douglas Quin, Stephan Schütze, Daniel Teruggi, Horacio Vaggione, Chris Watson and Christian Zanési, as well as a chance to glimpse a work in progress by Richard Barrett and Daryl Buckley.

The works exist across a wide sonic palette, encompassing vocalisations of everyday life; animal calls and soundscapes from the natural environment; sounds from the island of Madeira and the coast of West Africa; the human voice strained to breaking, the making and drinking of coffee; the lapping of water in Sydney Harbour.

For this exhibition the pieces will be continuously scheduled in the Gallery, while the Collection will eventually be heard on a new soundscape system planned for RMIT’s city campus.

Things that matter..

"Our lives matter. Imagine the world we would live in if we could put that simple truth into action." Lisa McDonad Director of Mission St Vincent's Mebourne