SUNRISE STUDIO
2020.
30 digital images.
Created for Monash University in collaboration with Jess Wilson, Monash Uni Student Theatre and Rockie Stone.
The pandemic has been especially hard for university students. Rather than the joyous experience of expansion that the first year of university traditionally provides, these students have graduated from the stress of year 12 into Zoom classrooms, separated from their cohort.
In early 2021, the ‘Dream Form’ was distributed to thousands of Monash students, asking them to think in a poetic and abstract way about their experiences of lockdown. Responding to their text responses, and their sense of dislocation, as though gravity had shifted, we created a suite of floating portraits of the students, each representing two moods of their lockdown. Students were suspended in a circus stunt harness and lifted into the air, where they explored physical manifestations of what they had most missed, the physical elements of the world they longed for, what they dreamed of when trapped at home, and what they most hoped for in the future.