Melody Woodnutt is a descendant of the pirate Blackjack Woodnutt, and has rambled around the world before landing in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia in 2018. She grew up in Innisfail and the Northern Beaches of Cairns/Gimuy and spent eight of her formative artistic years living in a remote Icelandic village by the sea.

Woodnutt works primarily within the expanded field of 16mm analogue moving image film. Artworks take form as large scale immersive installations, expanded cinema, short 16mm films, or printed photographic film stills. Melody’s films are often made from an alchemical feminist position as default (alongside bio-art’s concept of “witches in labs”).

Of late, her work has largely centred itself around ships, boats, and the vast complexities and unknowns of our world – such as the depths of the sea, cosmos, unknown liminal spaces, and Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’ (other spaces). With a deep pull towards unknowable realms such as the sea, cosmos, or spectral worlds, alongside explorations of intimacy and poetics the consequent artworks become abstracted glimpses of the unknown: a veil to a ‘thing-in-itself’. Comparable to a poem’s ability to obscure and reveal while holding myriad meanings, the same approach is taken in her work.

She is currently an active member of Artist Film Workshop – an artist-run film lab for 8mm and 16mm moving image based in Melbourne. Her works have been shown with NGV+Melbourne Design Week, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, PICA (Oregon, USA), Westminster Law School (UK), Atlantic Centre for the Arts (USA), and a variety of film festivals or venues in the USA, UK, Canada, Iceland, Europe, and Morocco. She has been supported with grants from Arts Queensland, Youth Arts Queensland, VCA Foundation, Menningarráð Norðurlands Vestra (Iceland), Vaxtarsamnigur Norðurlands Vestra (Iceland), Rannis Innovation+Research Triennial Funding (Iceland), Canada Council for the Arts, and Kulturkontakt Nord (Baltic/Nordic EU).

Selina Kudo