Fitlh Collective WORK
Ultraterrestrial
'Ultra-Terrestrial’s primary concern is with the human body, not an ideal or essentialist body, but a body that is always emerging through lived interaction. This line of enquiry draws heavily on the traditions of posthumanism, feminism, and queer theory; fields that have traditionally advocated for an understanding of the body as something that is culturally and historically produced, rather than fixed. As Donna Haraway has said of bodies, “…their boundaries materialize in social interaction; ‘objects’ like bodies do not pre-exist as such.” (1991, 208). The bodies that Ultra-Terrestrial seeks to represent are visceral, messy, and precarious. They co-opt discomfort, fragmentation, and contradiction as strategies for avoiding crisp outlines and essentialist platitudes.
Lewis Gittus
Lewis Gittus’ Through Peat and Pebbled Earth, is an audio and text-based installation, invoking bodily presence as an unclean alloy of animate/inanimate matter. Drawing upon a history of liminal bodily states within Gothic literature, as well as the ab-human sound design of body-horror cinema (enter Cronenberg), Through Peat and Pebbled Earth enacts an incomplete fall; rendering a creature that is viscerally familiar, while also a ghostly site of in-human activity.
Anna Schwann A sculptural work by Anna Schwann, Chalice/Bottomfeeder inhabits centre stage, from which creeping limbs transgress the wall and floors of the gallery. The work functions as a linking mechanism, a connective tissue between each artwork, the gallery, and the viewer’s body as it moves through the exhibition space. It aims to question the seemingly impenetrable boundaries of internal and external worlds. Chalice/Bottomfeeder uses scent and frothing liquids, serving as a queasy reminder of our own fragility.
Sarah Walker ‘Jump Scare’, uses synched binaural audio and video to create an immersive, theatrical experience drawing on the way horror cinema uses auditory tropes to produce and dispel tension. The work uses foley techniques to produce an unwieldy state of anxiety which comes unhinged from the real, producing an immersive space of humour, effort and haunting.
Andrea Meacham
Andrea Meacham’s ‘(ex)Magicka’ uses textiles, sculptural costume, painting and roving performance to tell the story of an ex-magician. Magic used to inspire this foolish character. He saw his awesomeness, his regal talent, in the professed smiles of incredulity and self-spruiking claims he possessed a slight-of-hand like no other. But people weren’t coming to his shows, even the super geeky pre-teens couldn’t pry their faces from TikTok and bear witness to the spectacle, he ruminated. He feared he’d lost his edge. Had he washed-up? Obsessed with shrunken audiences, fading youth and arthritic hands, he began a strict regime of Thalassotherapy. A heady diet of kelp, and spirulina gave his skin a greenish tinge. As the relentless steamy seawater baths and marine collagen injections began to take effect, he felt himself becoming something else, something strange. And yet, the urge to magic never left him.
Lewis Gittus
Lewis Gittus’ Through Peat and Pebbled Earth, is an audio and text-based installation, invoking bodily presence as an unclean alloy of animate/inanimate matter. Drawing upon a history of liminal bodily states within Gothic literature, as well as the ab-human sound design of body-horror cinema (enter Cronenberg), Through Peat and Pebbled Earth enacts an incomplete fall; rendering a creature that is viscerally familiar, while also a ghostly site of in-human activity.
Anna Schwann A sculptural work by Anna Schwann, Chalice/Bottomfeeder inhabits centre stage, from which creeping limbs transgress the wall and floors of the gallery. The work functions as a linking mechanism, a connective tissue between each artwork, the gallery, and the viewer’s body as it moves through the exhibition space. It aims to question the seemingly impenetrable boundaries of internal and external worlds. Chalice/Bottomfeeder uses scent and frothing liquids, serving as a queasy reminder of our own fragility.
Sarah Walker ‘Jump Scare’, uses synched binaural audio and video to create an immersive, theatrical experience drawing on the way horror cinema uses auditory tropes to produce and dispel tension. The work uses foley techniques to produce an unwieldy state of anxiety which comes unhinged from the real, producing an immersive space of humour, effort and haunting.
Andrea Meacham
Andrea Meacham’s ‘(ex)Magicka’ uses textiles, sculptural costume, painting and roving performance to tell the story of an ex-magician. Magic used to inspire this foolish character. He saw his awesomeness, his regal talent, in the professed smiles of incredulity and self-spruiking claims he possessed a slight-of-hand like no other. But people weren’t coming to his shows, even the super geeky pre-teens couldn’t pry their faces from TikTok and bear witness to the spectacle, he ruminated. He feared he’d lost his edge. Had he washed-up? Obsessed with shrunken audiences, fading youth and arthritic hands, he began a strict regime of Thalassotherapy. A heady diet of kelp, and spirulina gave his skin a greenish tinge. As the relentless steamy seawater baths and marine collagen injections began to take effect, he felt himself becoming something else, something strange. And yet, the urge to magic never left him.
Individual Practice Examples
Dominic Redfern
First Forms (2021 - https://dominicredfern.net/first-forms) was a six screen stereo sound video installation commissioned for the Experimenta Triennial, Life Forms. It dealt with the origin of life on earth expressed through scientism as a form of faith, or origin myth.A quote from the sound track to First Forms:
Life is electric: the passing of electrons from a larger molecule to another, smaller one. Breathe in oxygen, out comes carbon dioxide and water. And so, it goes around. Where did animate life begin? We still chase the long tale. Darwin wrote to a friend, "But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera” And it seems it was something just like that, as far as science can tell at this distance.
Man Cave (2025 - https://dominicredfern.net/Man-Cave) is an audio visual installation which utilises the tradition of the grotesque as a means of exploring masculine gender identities. Man Cave addresses this moment with curiosity and without apology. It seeks rather to explore the masculine as a species of grotesque. Just as the contemporary masculine defies traditional norms or easy definition, so the work is messy and unresolved, monstrous and tragi-comic. AI is being deployed as apposite co-creator in its uncanny moment. Like the contemporary masculine, another chimeric creature – lurking everywhere yet elusive, AI is an unquantified threat that is nonetheless an impossible to ignore element of contemporary society. This in-betweenness is captured in the corrupted aesthetic of broken technology, broken morphologies, broken texts, and ‘bad’ design. Man Cave does not offer solutions but writhes around in this messy moment to create a decrepit temple of the Res Artis Project Space.
Andrea Meacham
Andrea Meacham
‘The Colour of Garfield’
2025
Acrylic paint, tea, cotton
190×150 cm
Andrea Meacham
2024
‘The Flame Tree’ (film still)
Dual channel video and sound (08:15)
Link: https://vimeo.com/1005652833
Andrea Meacham
2025
‘Moon Clay Kids Workshop’
Presented at the Castlemaine Art Museum
Andrea Meacham
2024
‘Tear Jerker’ workshop
An art workshop that took place at Old Customs House in Fremantle as part of the solo show ‘Tear Jerker’ presented by Cool Change Contemporary
Lewis Gittus
Lewis Gittus, Through Peat and Pebbled Earth, VCA Artspace Gallery, 2022
Lewis Gittus and Karina Utomo, Heolstor (performance), Project8 Gallery, Melbourne, 2024Links to works
Lewis Gittus, Jellied Machines Pt.3, six-channel audio 10m:39s, VCA Artspace Gallery, Melbourne. 2023.
https://vimeo.com/1005314328?share=copy
Lewis Gittus, A Shadow Gliding, seven-channel audio, theatre drapes, scaffolding, VCA Artspace Gallery, Melbourne. 2023.
https://www.lewiscancut.com/a-shadow-gliding
Sarah Walker
Image: ‘Colosseum’, 2021 development BTS image.
Sarah Walker‘Colosseum’, 2021, The Unconformity, Queenstown, Tasmania, large-scale installation with video and sound. With Ian Pidd, Martyn Coutts and Dylan Sheridan. Developed over two years of community collaboration.
Image: ‘Colosseum’, 2021 development BTS image.
More info online here: https://sarahwalker.work/colosseum
Video: ‘Colosseum’ excerpt. https://vimeo.com/646838491/1714eda7b1?ts=0&share=copy
Sarah Walker
‘Bodies of Water’, 2022, presented by Platform Arts Geelong and UNESCO Cities of Design, immersive audio and live performance. With Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy.
More info online here: https://sarahwalker.work/bodies-of-water
Video: ‘Bodies of Water’ documentation.
https://vimeo.com/847673994
Anna Schwann
Anna Schwann
image from development on perverting the petrol station at Eaxo residency Crete 2025
see more here: https://vimeo.com/1106097731?share=copy#t=0
Barrier Cream, presented at Good Grief in Nipaluna/Hobart
2024, Supported by Artsbridge Tasmania, participatory installation and Delta Wave Day Spa workshop.
Image: Film still from Barrier Cream
see more here: https://annaschwann.org/Barrier-Cream-1
Soft in the middle and everywere else 2022 presented at the Gertrude St Projection festival. Installation, video and challenging marshmallow toast event on the opening night. See more here: https://annaschwann.org/Soft-in-the-middle-and-everywhere-else