Transformations of energy: drawing in motion by Emily Song

08 Apr 2025 - 02 May 2025
11:00am - 05:00pm
FREE
Melbourne City
First Site Gallery Storey Hall Basement, 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne

FIrst Site Gallery

Emily Song uses automatic drawing techniques to reveal ephemeral expressions of the unconscious mind and the fleeting nature of our existence.

Opening celebration night

Date:Wednesday 9 April

Time: 5-7pm

Emily Song, light and tulle / ink and paper (installation detail), 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

Transformations of energy: drawing in motion by Emily Song

Emily Song uses automatic drawing techniques to reveal ephemeral expressions of the unconscious mind and the fleeting nature of our existence. This ‘moving drawing’ installation features individual ink drawings projected onto hanging drapes of tulle. Visitors are encouraged to sit down and observe the hypnotic qualities of this flickering animation, offering a moment of reprieve from the consistent routine of daily life. The artist proposes an alternative method of making sense of the world around us, using automatic drawing – a surrealist technique involving drawing intuitively from the unconscious mind – as a meditation on states of remembering and forgetting.

Artist Biography

Emily Song is an Australian-born Chinese emerging artist who is based across Naarm (Melbourne) and Boorloo (Perth). Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in expanded drawing, manifesting through forms of painting, sculpture, installation and the moving image. Her work experiments with conscious and unconscious ways of making as a method to understand the world around her, her own lived experiences and multifaceted identities. Currently engaged with ideas of the ‘moving drawing’, Emily’s process-driven practice uses a sense of labour and repetitive methods of making. She explores ephemerality and impermanence through thematic ideas surrounding memory and forgetting, and the temporary nature of fleeting moments. In search of a kind of freedom and relinquishing agency over the process of creation, her most recent body of work has showcased a fascination in motion, energy and transformation through spatial investigations.

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Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

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Transformations of energy: drawing in motion by Emily Song