 To do this work that we do as artists in this field, you can't switch off those emotions. So mine are present. And they have to be, otherwise I can't do the work. I am going to show you a series of works. I want to talk to you not just about the subject of the work, but how to bring people inside it. Because I'm trying to call us all inside these stories. So I have to, I think, make spaces that invite you in. And this is where I began. I wanted to tell a story about coral, about marine reefs that were at risk. They don't have lovely faces. They're strange animals that live in symbiotic relationships with algae. We don't automatically love them. But they're in need. So this was my first portrait of coral. You had to come into a dark room and hold a glass bowl in your hands. You had to find the coral in your own fingertips. If you were rough with the bowls, if you dropped them, they would break. But you were seeing the coral alive in your hands. And with one gesture, when you handed that bowl to the person who came after you into the room, you also understood in one act what needs to happen. This has to be able to be handed on safely. So with the glass and with the image, I could say what I wanted to say to us as a community about something that belongs to all of us. And that set me on the path of how to do my work. Coral remains constant and will, for as long as I produce work, I will produce work about coral. It's a community like ours. This is, again, a coral that you might not respond well to. If you could see it under blue light, you might be more interested. And with this ability to fluoresce, it's struggling to survive increasing sea surface temperatures. But I still can't make you feel much about that. Unless I change your perspective in relation to it, I make it vast above you. And I make you small in relation to it. And for a moment, for a short period of time, while you're inside this video of coral, you're inside its world. And no one talks to you and no one explains to you, but you feel it's thrive for life. And that's the process that I need to bring to my work so I don't have to explain to you someone's right to live and environment's right to persist. I use the same process when it comes to work about grief and about loss and about trauma. This is a friend of mine, Ivy. She lost her partner very, very suddenly. I was asked to do a work that related to the place in Melbourne, which held Melbourne's first morgue. But I didn't want to do a work about a morgue. I wanted to do a work about grief. I happened to meet a woman on a tram who had lost her mother I think two weeks before. She told me her husband was tired of her crying and she needed to get herself together. She couldn't escape the kind of mist of grief fast enough for the people around her. We had a conversation that grief should not be rushed and I made this work in her honour, though she doesn't know it exists. I placed this woman in a public space in Melbourne during a festival and she sat behind that glass until you touched the glass in that space when she would wipe it just enough so you could see her eyes. The video of her was present to you just temporarily. Ivy, my friend, didn't cry. Her grief is held. She's not acting. She's showing you where she has come to. But the glass sometimes sheds a tear. And in that action, I'm still pulling people inside the work because grief is common to all of us. Grief is the one thing we can't escape. So I would go by at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. and see strangers holding their hands up to the glass with this video woman behind it. And that taught me about presence, about how we tell our stories to one another and how we create community through work. Community that helps us to deal with the things we deal with together. When I moved on from this work, I wanted to work on resilience, the stage after this grief. I filmed 10 women, all who now live in Australia, but all who have come from countries all over the world. Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, El Salvador, Chile. One was in Dachau. One was in a gulag in Siberia for six years. And their stories are inside the work for you to read. But I asked them if I could film them in such a way that you could be present to them. So let me show you how that work operates. At the end is a dinkle. So Dan was at war before she was gone. Her earliest memory was of being dragged across the river to escape soldiers. And her cousin was screaming. So that uncle put a cloth into her pocket. I think there should still never be you next to us. So you read the book. Then you walk up to a little doorway. The doorway just has blue light. You place your hand on the light. And one of the women, this is a video of Eva who was in the gulag. She steps forward and she puts her hand on your hand. The women in the work respond to you. This is a work not about their victimhood, not about what happened to them that caused them to flee. This is a work about what they made themselves into. So the disjuncture for me between what you read about them and what you experience about them is here. It's their love and their strength. Eva, who you're watching here, said to me when she saw this work, you know, you feel your pain and your sadness, but usually you don't see it. She encouraged me then to make a new work and that work was a portrait of whoever goes into the space because I think there's something in this. What is the sadness in ourselves that we need to face? Because that's what I learned from the women in evolution of fearlessness. Part of their resilience is to do with their ability to look something in the eyes. So I made this work next. You walk down a very dark, long tunnel, just like the women did when I made Evolution of Fearlessness. You can see virtually nothing inside there. When you arrive at the end of the tunnel, someone approaches you eventually. And just once you recognize that person, if you recognize that person, they begin to dissolve into points of light. The person who has come to see you is yourself. It's a live delayed feed of your own image walking down the corridor, unaware that anyone is there. The work is never filmed. You're the only person who sees it. But what you see is the thing Eva talked to me about. You see the part of yourself that you don't show anyone. So people inside this work have emerged saying the most incredible things to me which are hard to answer. Questions like, is everyone so sad? Questions like, who was that woman? She doesn't look well. Around 20% of people don't recognize themselves. I'm trying to say we are together in these struggles. And our ability to see those vulnerabilities in ourselves help us understand the vulnerabilities in others. And that brings me to this group of people. They live in a small industrial town south of Sydney. There's a lot of unemployment there. There's a lot of poverty there. There's a lot of resilience there. Like you find against the greatest struggle, the strongest people. Something in that ability to transform what is difficult into strength. They're sitting having a picnic in a graveyard because they realized that funerals were too expensive for a lot of their community members. And like a lot of resilient people, they're problem solvers. They know how to get by obstacles. They decided if funerals were too expensive, they would have to work out how to do them themselves and undercut the major companies that are operating and charging so much money that some people are taking 10 years to pay off a funeral for a family member. And some of these companies prevent you putting up a headstone until you've paid off the funeral. So they decide to have a workshop and learn how to do funerals. I'm going to show you a little bit about that process now. This is them at a workshop learning what they might have to do. And I'd love you to watch how it's filmed in relation to the other work. My young woman died of an ectopic pregnancy. She had an autopsy. And then I went and picked her up in the back of the car, not in a coffin on this board, just like that. And then we're bringing her home to the house where she died. This is her husband. And this is her mother who's come from Germany. And they've been trying to have a baby for 12 years. And the mother said, I said, you know, we can do all this. She said, I'm afraid. I said, if you trust me, I will get you there. So all the women came and the relatives. What I did with the mother was we took a corner of this each, the sheet, and I said, okay, when you're ready, let's pull it back together. So we didn't just do it all in one go. We just went step by step. And so this is where to hear. So for me in this moment, you know, this is every parent's right to have time with their child. But I know that that is not always the case. And that picture for me is very powerful. And it was her only daughter, her only child, her only grandchild, all gone. So you can see in the way I filmed that, I'm showing you what they're feeling. So you can imagine what they're seeing. I'm calling your imagination into the film. So that afterwards, when you see them washing a body, when you see them tending to their friend, when you see them caring in that way, when they've struggled and learned how to do it. It's our eyes who are watching the images. It's our eyes who are filming, filling with tears. It's us who are imagining, could we do that? That sharing, that transferring of the knowledge through struggle to resilience is what they offered by letting me film them. This is a public presentation of that film in Redfern in Sydney to a group of Aboriginal elders so that their knowledge could be shared, which is why I love this form of work. Because what is experienced is transformed into strength and the strength is transformed into knowledge. The most recent work I've done is with these people. The Mardu women in remote Western Australia. Their first contact of any sort was in the 1960s. These women all had their babies walking around in this desert and they asked me to come and film them. And I really didn't know why, because I didn't know them, but they are master painters. We see their paintings of their land, but we don't understand their land. So I went and camped with them. And I understood that their primary relationship is with this earth, which is why they can sleep on it like it's their mother. It's why they're comfortable in it all of the time. I'd heard the words about Aboriginal people's relationship to country, but this showed me it. They went hunting. They burnt the country. They tend to it by burning it. They tend to it by hunting in it. And they sit comfortably in it. And when you experience this work that I created for them as the basis of this camping trip, the video is huge. It surrounds you. So they're offering you through the work a way of being present in their land the way they are. This is the painting which they do all together. I'm trying to understand how eight women know what to paint on a canvas that's five meters by three meters. I'm also trying to understand what they're trying to tell me when they take me to see a waterhole, that they appear to greet as though it's their grandfather. I'm trying to understand through my filming, and I get it. They're asking me to film them so I can share it with you, but when you see their painting on the left and you see the satellite image of the area, they want to convey what it is that they know. When I pan across the two of those things, I don't need to say any more about these women's understanding of their place and what 40,000 years of a lineage in one place means. That's the purpose of my work. To make a space that goes from this, where we imagine where our fears might lie, but where hope could be, to this, which is the possibility of connection. And that's why these women are here. Thank you.