VANESSA WHITE

Salt Lake (2018/2019)

Vanessa White’s work, mainly video and painting, is focused on the gestures that a body makes.

This video draws on the ethereal and intuitive performance traditions of Butoh and Improvisation, in concert with the images of landscape and the environment, to see how the body in motion can be made to perform meaning.

Filmed at Lake Tyrrell in the Mallee district of Victoria, the lake is formed by a shallow, salt-crusted depression. Here land and sky appear to merge as the shallow, lake-water reflects an image of the sky.

Within this lake site, the interplay between performer and camera is choreographed precisely, merging an inner mind-scape with an outer landscape to generate liminal insights, evocatively connecting human perception with the natural environment.

The work explores human relations to the landscape, a dominant theme in the collection of Latrobe Regional Gallery.