A Manifesto in progress
Sep2020
Alysha Herrmann
My work is art and my art is work and both are my life and my self and the gaps between. But neither is the sum of me or everything that I choose to be.
My practice is relational.
My dreams are big and confusing.
My heart is bleeding and I am unashamed of that fact.
I am a daughter of regional Australia and my experience of place threads its way through everything I do. I was born on the lands of River Murray and Mallee Peoples and make my home here now as an adult.
I am the product of complex and fractured and forgotten (and remembered) histories. I stand on the shoulders of giants and survivors, of lovers and of criminals, of bad men and good men, of strong women and lost women, of people who broke down boundaries and binaries and of people who embraced them, of the mundane and the perfectly (perfect) ordinary. My DNA threaded with stories I will never know and some I am searching hard to uncover. I live, love, work and dream on Aboriginal lands. Always was, always will be.
I believe:
In connection
In courage
In slowness
I believe in joy
In breathing in (in breathing out)
In reaching out (and reaching in)
In being messy and imperfect and authentic
In taking time to give things the space to grow
In leaving things as good or better than I find them
That the little things are often the biggest things of all
I make:
Stories
Theatre and poetry and games and exhibitions and installations and gatherings and experiments and experiences and the small moments that happen between people and between places and between ideas.
I crave autonomy and ambitious visions, but most of all I crave action. Because intentions matter but they are nothing without practice. They are nothing without the doing.
I make mistakes. We all do. I am learning. Next to you. In front of you. Behind you. With you. Learning is lifelong and never static. Learning is the critical foundation of everything I am and everything I strive to do.
Success to me is standing side by side with you building a better world. Building a future for children that are not ours and that we will never meet.
To achieve that success I am willing to sleep in late, and even sometimes to get up very, very early. I am willing to resist the single story. I am willing to be difficult when I have to be and alone when I need to be. I am willing to be joyfilled and overflowing with gratitude. I am willing to lift you up. I am willing to get out of the way. I am willing to ask for help and to offer it. I am willing always and forever to learn and dream and strive and play the longest of long games (which is not a game at all, but a life and a tiny planet we share).
Alysha Herrmann 