By Eliza Wuttke (Port Lincoln)
This blog post is sharing some of the behind the scenes from our current project Be Part of Things: we are the project.
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Love Notes to the Laundromat is as much placemaking as it is artmaking. The idea being to spend time as an artist in residence in my own community — observing, connecting, writing, existing. Community feels slippery to me, until recently I didn’t feel a sense of true attachment to the place I call home, I felt as though I was transiting through. Longing for a sense of belonging and fed up with searching the map for a place I might find it, I turned inward and set about trying to fall in love with where I live, Port Lincoln, Galinyala, on Barngarla Country, Eyre Peninsula. Immersing myself in the community, its culture and the ocean. Love Notes to the Laundromat comes from this, a series of love notes to the places where people gather and connect. It’s a love note to community and to place.
Originally Love Notes to the Laundromat was intended to be completely ephemeral, I would write an anonymous love note and pin it on a notice board or leave a copy on the table of a shared space for the next person to find. In time, this project morphed into something more visible, a public statement of my new found connection. I hope that by sharing these notes, others might find their own connection to place. And if nothing else, it will strengthen my own.
To be presenting this collection of solo works at SALT Festival feels pretty special. The festival and the people who make it happen have been a huge part of making me feel connected to this place. In the festival’s eight years I have been an audience member, volunteer, committee member and Festival Coordinator. To now present this work, on belonging, as a festival contributor feels like a powerful full circle moment and I am incredibly excited to share this with my community, here in paradise.
Love Notes to the Laundromat at SALT Festival is also the first time that the three of us (Kirste, Alysha and Eliza) will spend time together in person during our multi-year, collaborative project, Be Part of Things: we are the project. Together we’ll be hosting an artist gathering at SALT Festival, transplanting some of the magic of our fortnightly collaborative Zoom’s into physical time and space, opening the circle to other artists and introducing Part of Things into the Port Lincoln community. The long term vision is that Part of Things will find its place in this community, perhaps not in the same form as it takes in its Barmera home, but a place nonetheless.
Love Notes to the Laundromat, the collection in full, will be showing at The SALT Shaker Festival Hub, Nautilus Arts Centre Port Lincoln, as part of SALT Festival – April 19 to 28.
Be Part of Things, artist gathering at SALT Festival will take place in the SALT Shaker on Saturday April 27 from 2pm.
Be Part of Things: we are the project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body and the Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia.
#regionalarts #creativeregions #regionalartsaustralia #regionalstories
Part of Things 