Ellie Hannon

Local Bushwalk, South Newcastle, Bathers Way, Muloobinba, Newcastle 2024

Anatomy of a Stream is a choreographic inquiry into what emerges when bodies, relationships and ecosystems move between states of flow and control. Movement of water becomes both material and metaphor, tracing the tensions between fluidity and constraint, transformation and adaptation.

Drawing on the concept of counter-mapping, artist Ellie Hannon follows a creek as it meanders from suburban forest to concrete urban channel. A sound work produced in collaboration with Clint Topic and textile installation become new forms of bathymetry, examining the changing characteristics of the creek’s infrastructures and ecologies. Field recordings of ripples, tumbling stones, submerged movement and industry form an abstracted visual and sonic language responsive to the creek’s shifting conditions.

Dancer Jacinta responds through an embodied exploration of algae, an organism that sustains aquatic life while also signalling ecological stress. Her movements shift between fluidity and constraint, performing currents, eddies and ripples alongside the pressures of altered waterways and human control.

Together, sound, movement and objects create an environment that draws parallels between healthy relational systems and systems of control and manipulation. Moving between comfort and unease, the work asks: what happens when we can no longer flow, and is adaptation always the answer?

 On noticing…

In the bush I notice temporality and unpredictability; cloud movements across the sky and their shadows carpeting the ground, a meandering insect mark etched on a tree, a confused line of ants zigzagging across red sand and a length of grass forming its own drawing as it moves in motion with the wind. 

In the city I notice random dirt trails that dart between the right angles of concrete and asphalt, a trace of city dwellers yearning for choice. The tension that exists between nature and the urban environment is seen in these slowly eroding desire paths, where a soft emerging autonomy contrasts with the hardness of infrastructures. I see my freshly landed footsteps contribute to this act of choice, certain and deliberate, written over earlier foot-tracks in the dust. 

I acknowledge the Awabakal and Worimi people as the traditional owners of the country that i call my home base, this incredible place upon which I live, work, garden, explore and foster community, I appreciate and respect it endlessly. I recognise that sovereignty was never ceded and I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.