Blaide Lallemand

Blaide Lallemand takes an interdisciplinary approach to making works of art, fusing her knowledge of sculptural practices with a range of ephemeral practices including performance, new media and site-specific installation. Blaide has also built her art practice around collaboration. Often initiating/guiding collaborative projects with artists from different back grounds such as musicians, actors, photographers and video artists’. She is also interested in immersing the audience into the artwork, enabling them to have a visceral experience and choice to actively participate with the realization and evolution of the artwork.

Blaide studied acting at the University of Western Sydney before graduating from the ANU School of Art with first class Honours in 2003. She is interested in exploring cycles in nature, rhythms of the body and aspects of intimate social and physical relationships between people and their complex means of communication. Her spatial-temporal works incorporate the senses of sight, hearing and touch to encourage intimate engagement with the work and other participants in the exhibition space.

She has participated in group shows such as the 2016 and 2010 Blake Prize, Something in the Air: Collage and Assemblage in Canberra Region Art at Canberra Museum and Gallery, Portable Worlds 1 and 11 organised by ANAT, this toured the east and south coast of Australia and featured in the 2007 international pocket film festival at the Pompidou Centre France. Other significant group shows include the 2005 Olive Cotton Portrait Award, Tweed Heads Regional Gallery and Biodiversity and Sustainable Resources, at the Australian Museum in Sydney. In 1995 she was a summer scholar at the National Gallery of Australia and was fortunate to be a part of their show Don’t leave me this way: Art in the Age of Aids. Art prizes include winning the 2005 Phoenix Prize for Spiritual Art, ANU Gallery in Canberra, with an interactive immersive installation entitled Light of Heart and the 2001 Prospect Portrait Prize, Adelaide with her performance entitled Autumn. She has also exhibited several solo shows in Canberra.

Since 2016 Blaide has regularly been invited to facilitate community art works for organisations such as Anglicare, Tuggeranong arts centre and Uniting Amala aged care.

About my practise

As a person who is curious about the how and why of life, I make art in all mediums to explore and express my take on these concepts. Themes that reoccur in my practice range from life cycles found in nature through to the ever-evolving cultural and societal roles people are expected to play in various stages of their life. I often draw directly from my own experience. As a child who experienced great displacement, I was exposed to a wide range of living arrangements – institutional care and various foster families – each with their own value systems. I was able to see that there are many ways of being in the world … and I’d work out the best ways to harmoniously fit in. As a way of processing these rich experiences, I often make art about relationships and how the nature of self/identity is constantly changing. At times I tap into my internal world of emotions and philosophical spaces, creating symbolic visual expressions. On other occasions I explore the world outside me, the external systems of community and culture, observing the ever-changing roles that people play in various constructed spaces, places and environments. Both of these worlds coalesce and influence my being. I’ve made works in all mediums from photography, video, performance to immersive interactive installations and painting.

As a transdisciplinary artist I don’t lock into a ‘style’. Instead I observe and respond to my internal and external environments. It’s a very liberating mode of operation! Some of my artworks have won awards: in Canberra, Goulburn, Adelaide and New York. The pull to make art is always changing … but it’s always there and it’s reliably strong. At times it’s a personal desire to soothe and ground me, and at others it’s to generously create a shared space for transformative experiences. I also make for the pleasure of the experience as well as the challenge in bringing forth an unknown idea/concept and shaping it in the physical.

http://www.blaidelallemand.com/

Video work

Journey to Morning

Blaide Lallemand and Hilary Cuerden-Clifford

In sleep, our movements are no longer directed by our conscious selves, other body rhythms are revealed. Something deeper in the nature of the person, other truths are brought to the surface. From 2003-2018, Blaide and Hilary have been photographing people of various ages, gender and cultural backgrounds in the state of sleep. Using black and white 35mm film, with unusually long thirty minute exposures. These photographic portraits of compressed time, have been sequenced into video. In this video we see the journey of Oliver an 80 year old man, Dave and Ali a couple in their 20’s and Louise who was 37 weeks pregnant with her first child. These are explorative portraits, taken in the studio, where the person is naked, removed of all their material possessions and left alone to sleep. Here the viewers’ attention is focused on the body language of the subject, gaining insights into how they carry themselves through life. The photographs map the sleepers’ uninhibited movements. They are no longer aware of the photographer as the image is building up, they are not consciously reacting to the camera and we are not seeing them frozen in time but travelling through it. These sleepers are vulnerable and unassailable, in their own worlds and yet visible to the viewers. Sleep is an experience all humans share, it is a fundamental part of being alive and when we are asleep, we are perhaps most ourselves, most unique.

reacting to then and now

An interactive artwork, in response to Elizabeth Gower's painting, Then and Now. 270 magnetic metal pieces were laser cut and painted. Cab Huf has animated these. This work was made possible thanks to artsACT project funding.