WAIT

W A I T - three digital video art works on one of the great human acts.

Town Hall, Bondi and Mona Lisa. This trilogy was filmed outside the Town Hall in Sydney, beside the waters of the Pacific and in The Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa. They are about an adventure of the spirit - waiting. I discover this subject in three different ways.

I have spent the past three years making three video art-works on what has come to be a profoundly important subject for me—waiting. A few years ago a friend told me: ‘It’s a wonderful thing to see people wait’. ‘Really?’ I thought. Those words resonated with me, they sowed a seed, and I set out to explore it.

My son George was with me in Paris last year and there he gave me the idea to film the third of the trilogy in the Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa. ‘The people are more interesting than the work itself’, George said, as he snapped a photograph, along with five hundred other people. Later that night I looked carefully at his photograph and I noticed a woman in the seething crowd; she was waiting in front of that famous work. ‘This is where I will film’, I thought. ‘After all, no one will stop me, or even notice me, because ‘almost’ everyone is filming in that throng.’

In life nothing ever happens the way we think it will. Life constantly reminds us, ‘We can be certain of nothing. We do not know’.  These videos explore that uncertain uncomfortable state.  

While making these art works I began to see more and more in this subject, in the kind of waiting that is active, in the waiting that actually seeks reality.

—Juliet Darling

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Juliet Darling is a film maker, artist and writer. She studied at the Canberra School of Art, the Swinburne Film and Television School in Melbourne, Australia. Darling has exhibited her paintings, drawings and cartoons in Australia and Europe, including solo exhibitions at The Arts Council Gallery, Canberra, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, Realities Gallery, Melbourne, The ABC, Ultimo, Sydney and the Sydney Dance Company. She has collaborated on numerous film and television projects, and has written, directed and produced three films: A Curator’s Last Will and Testament, A Pair of One and Dead Letters (associate producer Jane Campion) which was nominated for Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff television awards (1998). Darling’s first collection of poems Elements in a State of Wonder was published in 2012 and her memoir A Double Spring was published by Allen and Unwin in 2013. In work encompassing film, digital video, drawing and printmaking, Darling explores interpersonal communication and the themes of humanism, the self in relationship with others. This will be her sixth exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.