Sharifah Emalia Al-Gadrie and Tilley Wood

Good Grief Studios for Hobiennale Festival, Nov 2019
 

Surf’s Up but Everything Else is Down: A Pantomime on Coral Bleaching intersects textile-based sculpture with collaborative performance to document a personal response to waste production in Australia and the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef that is projected to occur over our lifetimes. It is a performance held over 1.5 hours which involves Emalia and Tilley creating a large knitted rope using only our arms. The yarn which we knit with is made from repurposed and found textile waste and will be unfurled from a giant spool which sits on the ground between us. As the spool unwinds, the foraged yarn is gradually bleached of its original colour, providing a direct allegory for the ongoing coral bleaching suffered by the reef as a result of both direct and indirect human impact. The thread will be 560m long and we will present the work in three parts: our entrance, our process and the finished knitted rope. 

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The performance was exhibited at Good Grief Studios as part of Hobiennale Festival 2019.