Situate Residency

In late August 2022, I undertook a 5 day residency in Queenstown Tasmania. The purpose of this was to spend time in the time with complete creative freedom in order to start developing a project. My parents still live there, I grew up there myself, so it made sense to stay with them for the duration of the residency. I was really stuck with where to start, what to make, what to do, and I thought I would finish the week out with nothing artistic having been achieved. I was even given the opportunity to leave after a day which was so tempting to me I almost took it.
My mother and I used to watch horror movies when I was growing up, it was a thing that was just for us. I would scour the internet in my teenage years looking for films that we could watch together. The week I spent with here was much the same, we spent a lot of our time together watching horror movies, though the difference being we were watching them on Netflix and not having pirated them. The Shining (1980) by Stanley Kubrick is my favourite film, and we have a joke that is ongoing for at least 15 years now, in which when my mother asks which movie should we watch, I suggest The Shining, and she will reply with something along the lines of it would be more fun to gouge our eyes out. This is due to me having watched the film so much growing up the VHS tape is all but exhausted. I still thought about the similarities of our situation and The Shining though; we were relatively isolated, in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, and it was just our family - it was uncanny.
We watched decided to watch Midsommar (2019) by Ari Aster, which had a positive reception, and I was taken with how bright and happy the visuals were. Everything looked so inviting and almost cosy despite what was happening.
A lot of things coalesced for me in this moment. While I was undertaking my residency, other artists were having to remove their installation due to a particularly aggressive reaction to it by the locals. It formed in my mind that I can create a project that can look and perform positivity and happiness while discussing violence and brutality. With this in mind I started to research local folklore, the history of folk horror, and folk art, and in my travels kept particular attention to the flora surrounding me.