My work PLASTICUS is now featured on the Climarte: Emergency Action poster website.
Please follow the link to look at the website:
https://climarte.org/project/climarte-poster-project-iii-a-call-to-art-2021-22/
Climarte Poster
The Crones are Coming!!!
RECLAIM THE CRONE
by Gabrielle Leah New and the Space Between Performance Collective
Getting old doesn’t have to mean becoming invisible.
Reclaiming beauty, power, experience, knowledge, strength – and shoving it in everyone’s faces…with elegance (or not)…
Reclaim the Crone is a Performance Installation that explores the reclamation of the Crone/Wise Woman archetype.
Funny. Challenging. Whimsical. Multilayered.
Reclaim the Crone explores the archetypal energy of the Wise Woman or Crone delving into current cultural attitudes toward older women and the feelings of invisibility that older women experience to raise awareness of these issues.
Employing a multi-layered theatrical approach allowing audiences an opportunity to examine their views of older women seeing the beauty, power, experience, knowledge and strength of the aged as a provocation to develop our relationship to Mother Earth as a symbol of the Old Wise Woman.
With: Karen Berger, Helen Smith and Gabrielle Leah New. Music by Norm Skipp.
New Project: What to do with All the Plastic?
During the Great Melbourne Lockdown of 2020 my soft plastic collection at the local Woolies was cancelled after some smart cookie put a used nappy into the mix. The question triggered me to begin weaving our plastic waste to create 3 works; 24 Photographs of the woven pieces “One Small Step’, which were recycled into a monster costume for photos and video performance “Plasticus’, and then an installation ‘Does it Scare you?’.
Exciting Stuff!! Hopefully coming to a gallery soon.
Call of the Running Tide 2021
I have had two video works selected for this years Call of the Running Tide Festival in Port Douglas.
The Spirit of (Our) Nature is a 2018 video performance and a special edit of The Colour of Death : White made in collaboration with Carolyn Cardinet are both being exhibited. In recent years my work has taken on a more environmental and sustainability, one world focus.
If you are in Port Douglas later in the year check it out and support the festival or follow online.
NAOMI has Laurels! Official Selection Green Screen Film Festival
Naomi is an ex-mermaid, eco-crusader,
fashionista model originally from
Westernport Bay, Australia.
She has a pet hamster
and a message for the World….
Gabrielle Leah New, Carolyn Cardinet and Phil Soliman collaborate to create this brand new video performance of the times ‘NAOMI’.
Working across a range of mediums including sound, costume, performance and video the artists question the current paradigms and shine a light onto contemporary environmental issues whilst seeking places of hope and beauty amidst feelings of undulating despair and impotence. Naomi is their champion on this crusade to create a better world, she offers some light that change can happen in these dark times.
Naomi is a Mermaid from Westernport Bay, Australia. She moved to L.A to model as a way of raising awareness about plastic waste in the ocean, climate change and sustainable living.
Her dress is constructed from plastic hay bale ties supporting her message of re-use and recycle for a sustainable future.
The audience is taken on a fun yet serious journey through a series of surreal landscapes of altered nature as Naomi’s story unfolds. The beautiful, strange images engage a sense of the mythical as backgrounds morph and kaleidoscope and Naomi multiplies and grows, shrinks and reduces giving a wonderland impression speaking to the sensitivity and resilience of nature. Naomi wants humanity to take more care of our air, water and land and she’s a little bit grumpy with our disrespect and disregard for the elements that sustain all life.
NAOMI will screen at 3pm on Tuesday the 17th of November
WATCH @greenscreenfilmfestSUBSCRIBE – GreenScreen Film Fest Youtube ChannelVOTE at greenscreenfest.com from noon 19 November (3pm Victoria time!)
There will be a beautiful voting page to go to with all the Official Selection film posters! Please vote for NAOMI in The Peoples Choice Awards
Follow on Insta @greenscreenfest .
Poem to be Published…coming soon
ANTEDILUVIAN GODDESS
By GABRIELLE LEAH NEW
Black envelops and swallows
Abyss, holes in space, Caves, bowels of the earth
The antediluvian goddess emerges from the calyx of a Lilylike flower
The Queen of Heaven, of need and desire
The Queen of the dead, the harvest, the fire.
The Spirit of life, subtler and more lucid
She exists before the creation of light
She remains audible only to sages.
An ordinary woman in an attitude of prayer
Cradled in her arms a child
At her feet the crescent moon
Cradled in her arms a corpse.
Grimm unsettling dreams she finds herself
A chilling vision of transformation
The loveliness, the fearsomeness, the portentousness of its
Measured concealments and revealments
At once charming and grotesque
Alludes to the mysteries of descent and resurrection.
A line drawing traces a path
Ascending to the celestial realms.
A series of trials marked by sand, water, lightning and cloud.
Naked but for her ornaments
A feeling of mystery and warning.
Suggestive of the rolling cosmic seas,
the eternal, the never-ending
She is revealed in a pose of dancing.
Thousand-rayed existing in a hundred forms
Watch, now, now as I start the day
Running like a herd of luminous deer
Stepping lightly between not there and here.
Hello Naomi
Naomi is an ex-mermaid, Eco-crusader fashionista model who stars in the new art-video I’m creating with collaborator Carolyn Cardinet (who made the fabulous costume) and composer and sound artist Phil Soloman is lined up to come on board.
Stay tuned for updates and exhibitions.
YSG Residency has begun! Volunteers Needed
Yesterday Carolyn Cardinet and I started our 2 month long Yarra Sculpture Gallery Residency and began working on our collaborative project ‘Silent Witness’.
I am creating a video projection work and would love your help if you have some time to volunteer. The above image if a mock-up of the Reflection Pool I’m creating and I’m looking for volunteers of all ages, genders and nationalities to take part. It would mean a visit to the Gallery in Collingwood and filming takes between 15 and 30 minutes. People with a performance or Butoh background brilliant but no experience necessary just a willingness to have fun, make faces and follow direction.
Bring your skates (great floor) and share a cuppa.
Contact: gabrielleleahnew@gmail.com to book in a time.
Thanks
Residency for Silent Witness
On July 1st Carolyn Cardinet and I will begin a 2-month winter residency with the Yarra Sculpture Gallery in Collingwood, Melbourne to develop a new work ‘Silent Witness’.
It will culminate in an exhibition which hopefully people will be able to attend depending on Covid restrictions at the end of August. I will also be doing a call out for people to volunteer to be in a new video work (covid safety measures will be in place) ‘Reflection Pool’.
Kooyoora Body Landscape-Trees
what i’ve learnt about trees
Trees exist in the 5th dimension
Trees exist in family clusters
Trees talk to each other
Trees stand sentry over sacred spaces
Trees have a lot to tell us if we listen
We are symbiotic with Trees
We breathe with Trees
Old Trees are caring Grandmothers and offer comfort
Trees understand the Birth-Life-Death cycle
Trees are community who support each other.
Trees move in stillness
Trees can teach us
Trees are homes
Trees smell delicious
Trees are magnificent
Trees can hold us
Trees are fractals of themselves
Trees want to be friends
Trees dance with the wind
GABRIELLE LEAH NEW 