The Storm and the Still in the Art of Bridie Lunney

Abstract

Schmidt considers Australian artist Bridie Lunney’s practice in terms of movement, stillness and temporality. She discusses relationships between Lunney’s objects, performers, witnesses and installation space through the conceptual frames of ekstasis and enstasis. Schmidt employs the concept of ekstasis to signify a movement out, and enstasis as a movement in. Key to the discussion is a breath-like movement as anima, a vital force that moves all people and things. With reference to writers such as Mieke Bal, Spyros Papapetros and Rebecca Schneider, Schmidt proposes that Lunney’s body–object configurations produce a material–energetic continuum that enunciates contraction and expansion, suspension and collapse, tension and release.