Animations 1998

Catalogue / Memoir
Introduction Pictures Objects Animations

ANIMATIONS are made from things I have made and found.

1973---- 1988---- 1991---- 1994---- 1995---- 1998---- 2000---- 2001---- 2003---- 2006---- 2007---- 2008---- 2009---- 2010---- 2011---- 2012---- 2013---- 2014---- 2015---- 2016---- 2017---- 2018---- 2019---- 2020---- 2021---- 2022---- 2023---- 2024---- 2025---- 2026----

Terra Incognita

Launched at Gallery 101 Melbourne, this animated interactive work charts the fiction of Tasmanian writer Carmel Bird. Carmel read aloud as the work played on a data projector within an installation of artworks made in Tasmania for making the animations.

Tour through Terra Incognita

"Pandora and Violetta", in Terra Incognita

During 1996-98 I made a series of landscapes, life drawings, and symbolic images while living in Launceston, Tasmania, where writer Carmel Bird was born and grew up. To what extent these images are my own response to that place, or filtered through the word pictures in Carmel's stories I can't say. But I worked with a very strong sense that here were the beginnings of her vision of fact and fiction that is her world, and mine; I felt myself working to chart this part of the world for myself.

These images form the basis for an interactive "map" of the creative process I perceived at work in Carmel's writing. They were combined with some art work made long before the move to Tasmania. Imagery and animations were made by hand, and made directly on computer, in response to reading Carmel's novels Cherry Ripe, The White Garden and Automatic Teller.

Lisa Roberts,
Terra Incognita exhibition catalogue, 1995
ISBN 0 9585963 0 1

Broadly speaking much of my fiction examines, at a certain level, the feeling and development of female powerlessness. Consequently the red shoe appears from time to time as a familiar emblem. Two works of Hans Christian Anderson that turn on irony and tragedy of the powerless female are The Little Mermaid and The Red Shoes. These are two stories that have interested me greatly since I was a child, and they have surfaced in particular in The White Garden and Red Shoes.

These novels are part of a trilogy yet to be completed in The Mandala Trilogy in which a principal concern is the examination of how certain types of power operate. The image of the mandala builds a rich ground in which to locate the narratives, and the language of alchemy lends itself to the expression of the deeper themes.

Lisa has adopted the maze for her exploration of creativity in Terra Incognita, and this seems to me to be the most apt shape with which to embrace the development of my fiction.

Carmel Bird
Terra Incognita exhibition catalogue, 1995
ISBN 0 9585963 0 1

1992 Carmel Bird Sewing the machine from Tasmania Oil on canvas, private collection, Melbourne

1995 Lisa Roberts setting up for the launch of Beware of Pedestrians, Snakepit gallery, Launceston, Tasmania

An interactive CDROM and a collection of drawings, paintings and assemblages were made as part of an inquiry into the creative process of Tasmanian writer Carmel Bird.

This work formed the major part of a research project for a Masters of Art undertaken at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's Animation and Interactive Media Centre (2000). An installation of the completed body of work was launched at Gallery 101, Melbourne, with a live reading by Carmel Bird.