Editorial 6 September 2017

This week, fascinating works for watching and listening. For our new Critical Audio series, Tasmania’s Sisters Akousmatica (image above) have made a playlist of sound works created by adventurous Australian female practitioners. And visual artist Gabriella Hirst does a double-act. Featured in our latest Critical Video series, she struggles against a relentless wind to practise her craft, and, as part of our ongoing Arts Education feature, reflects on her time at COFA (now UNSW Art & Design) and the National Art School and on the trajectory her career has taken from Berlin to London. In observations that suggest an organic vision of art practice, Hirst writes of cross-disciplinary practice that “research and adopted medium are in constant interplay” and that art schools yield art ecosystems. Also this week, Joanna Di Mattia offers an impressive account of Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country and kindred films that allow “straight audiences [to] deal with the realities of queer desire” and so see in queer bodies “actual flesh and blood human beings.” Keith and Virginia

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Top image credit: Julia Drouhin, Pip Stafford (Sisters Akousmatica) at Next Wave, 2016, photo by Keelan O’Hehir.