Belinda Locke

– Exhibitions, Friday 13th November 2009, Saturday 14th November 2009

Belinda Locke is an emerging artist in her final year of study for a Bachelor of Creative Industries in Drama at the Queensland University of Technology. In the past she has worked on projects with directors Anna Yen, Liz Skitch, David Fenton, Benjamin Knapton and Nic Vogelpoel. Belinda is also the General Manager of QUT’s student theatre company, Vena Cava Productions. She began training in physical theatre at the age of 14 through the Young Physical Actor Training run by Zen Zen Zo. In 2007 Belinda was one of the co-creators of the Stop Violence Against Women Project directed by Anna Yen in association with Amnesty International and the Queensland University of Technology. Now she is interested in using her bodily awareness to devise contemporary performance artworks that address both personal and existential issues. Belinda has been influenced by performance artist Janine Antoni, the practice of Robert Lepage and postdramatic theory. In the future she would like to produce work that further fuses the boundaries between visual art and performance and the real and the fictional.

Main Meal (Dinner for 6.7 Billion) (2008) was designed to comment on the current environmental crisis and human involvement in the devastation of our planet. I was interested in creating an installation that dealt with the uneasy relationship I feel between my role as a consumer and that of an environmentally conscious individual. The work pushes boundaries because it activates and implicates the viewer as responsible for the situation presented before them. For me, it was important to situate my work on a dinner table because of its association with the everyday ritual of eating. To place multiple casts of a globe in this context therefore jars with preconceived notions of what should sit there and asserts the culture of mass consumption as a domestic, personal issue.

Main Meal (Dinner for 6.7 Billion) attributes the viewer with an active role in the installation. The empty chairs are inundated with a sense of human absence and present the possibility that the viewer belongs in the seat, or that we all universally occupy the position. Due to the subject matter this implicates the viewer as part of the wider social problem and appeals to their moral consciousness to take steps to minimise their consumption for the benefit of all of humanity.