MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: Australian Film Television and Radio School

Lynette Wallworth, internationally renowned video installation artist, was announced as the first Australian Film Television and Radio School Creative Fellow. The announcement was made at the School for film industry and arts sector guests where Sandra Levy, AFTRS CEO, congratulated Wallworth on her visionary ideas and her exciting project.

Sandra Levy said “Lynette Wallworth is certainly one of those artist who has the imagination and ability to tell wonderful stories in a new form that astound audiences and engage them on an emotional level. As a pioneer in her field, it is a great pleasure to name her our very first Creative Fellow”

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist whose practice spans video installation, photography and short film. She specialises in the creation of immersive installation artworks that offer viewers a chance to touch and feel them and to experience an emotional response.

Wallworth will use the Fellowship to support her writing and to devise a full-length work to be shown in digital planetariums around the world.

“Full-dome environments offer an incredible alternate and immersive cinema space but it is absolutely rare that an individual artist outside of the institutions that drive them has the means to make a full-length work specifically for the full-dome environment. I am thrilled that AFTRS has decided to support such a work through their Fellowship,” says Ms Wallworth.

This will form part of a broader cross platform project entitled Rekindling Venus, to be launched in June 2012 and produced by Sue Maslin, Film Art Media and Forma.org.uk

She continues “I did my first residency in a digital planetarium in Albuquerque, New Mexico - in the USA - in 2003 before Australia had opened its first full-dome environment. Since that time I have struggled to find a way to make a work for the dome. It feels like a perfect place to reflect on our fragile environment to a wider world and yet it is a particular space that requires unique skills to wrangle, which largely means access to time. I am grateful that the Fellowship will provide that time for me to develop a work for the dome and hopefully to provide, through the link to AFTRS, a template for future works to be made by other artists who, like me, have only dreamt of what might be done there.”

Lynette Wallworth’s work has been exhibited in the UK, France, New York and Australia. In particular, the British Film Institute Gallery London commissioned Hold: Vessel 2 in June 2007, and in 2009 she was invited to present Evolution of Fearlessness at the Sundance Film Festival, Utah.

Her largest exhibit to date, Duality of Light was shown at the Adelaide Film Festival in Adelaide in 2009. A 30-minute documentary by Plexus films, co-commissioned by and screened on the ABC tracked the development of this piece.

In 2010 the Sydney Festival presented three of Wallworth’s renowned works, Invisible by Night, Evolution of Fearlessness and Duality of Light for the first time as a trilogy, to critical acclaim.

“We have become translated into a new reality, rewritten by the language of physics, or perhaps religion, for the dematerialised self is also a metaphor for the soul” - John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald, February 2009

Since then Wallworth has presented 40 film fragments for a staging of Kafka Fragments, which toured Holland featuring renowned violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and soprano Susan Narucki. In April 2010 Wallworth contributed interactive footage for her first video piece for opera, Fiona Shaw’s direction of Elegy for Young Lovers presented by the English National Opera at the Young Vic, London.

“Wallworth’s works make deceptively simple use of combining light and transparency with interactive technology. The results are variations on magical seduction. - Robert Clark, The Guardian UK, March 2007

The Australian Film Television and Radio School Creative Fellowship is designed to advance the work of creative voices in the screen arts and broadcasting sector and provides funding for talented individuals or small collaborative groups with ideas for moving image or screen-based projects.

The School looks forward to continuing their commitment to the Creative Fellowship Awards in the coming years.

Australian Film Television and Radio School