No Limit introduces the Hedgewitch- my alter ego, a trickster, wanderer and urban spell-caster. In spirit, if not in practice, she carries something of the old folk witch — wild and untamed, moving through spaces built for order and control. A 21st-century mystic on one long dérive, testing the city's physical and psychic boundaries.

In folklore, hedge witches lived on the edge of villages, working with plants and unseen forces, moving between the cultivated and the wild. This Hedgewitch occupies a similar threshold as she moves through places marked by formal landscaping and architectural dominance. Her head is a plastic topiary sphere, a mass-produced, imperfect version of the real hedges she moves through. There's a small joke buried in it: manicured gardens like these often imitate the order and grandeur of European estates, and her plastic sphere, in turn, imitates them.

She wanders through Venice's labyrinthine alleys and the hedge maze at Villa Pisani, stands among the tetrapods on the Alexandria breakwater, and appears in a Cairo hotel garden with the Pyramids behind her. This was footage filmed during my father's first return to Egypt in over fifty years. Her costume is a type of court jester camouflage and is printed with photographic fragments collected during urban walks.

The installation combines three-channel video, suspended acrylic discs and a large wall collage made from the same imagery as the costume. The video plays across sculptural screens built from shipping container panels, anchored by a maze of tiled blocks and hazard tape.

No Limit
2019
Three-channel video installation
Digital video (8:50 min, looped), acrylic discs, photographic collage, mannequin with custom costume, tiled blocks, shipping container panels and steel, hazard tape
Soundscape by Lola Paulova
First exhibited at VCA Masters Exhibition, Martin Myer Arena, Southbank, Melbourne.