Here and Now: Gold Coast Triennial 2024 Digital Gallery
Bella Deary
b.2000 Sydney NSW, lives Brisbane QLD
Dancing With My Dad , 2024
single-channel video
08:53 minutes, sound
Image courtesy of the artist
Artist Statement
Dancing with my Dad is a video work that documents the artist learning and performing short, semi-choreographed, site-responsive dance routines beside bodies of water with her father, an ex-professional dancer.
The father and daughter duo perform fluid gestures inspired by the rippling patterns of water, considering the entanglement of human ‘bodies of water’ with nature’s bodies of water. Dancing with my Dad speaks to rekindling familial and nonfamilial kinships in times of crisis: those environmental, physical, and emotional.
About the Artist
Bella Deary is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based visual artist and PhD candidate whose art practice challenges the anthropocentric worldview dominating the Anthropocene, gathering influence from ecological philosophy and marine science. Her practice-led research sees the creation of multimedia installations that interweave latex sculptures with video projection, sound, architecture, and electronics, provoked by themes of interspecies entanglement and symbiosis.
Bella's current PhD research investigates art-science collaborations and is supported by an Australian Government RTP Scholarship. She was the recipient of the 2021 Hilde Chenhall Memorial Scholarship; the 2020 Milani Family Art Prize; and the 2022 CIESJ HDR Research Showcase Creative Work Prize. She has exhibited widely throughout Southeast Queensland, Sydney, and Finland (following a 2023 residency in Fiskars Village); and is a co-director of Nextdoor ARI, an artist-run initiative supporting emerging artists in Southeast Queensland.
