Environmental Art & Design Prize

To the Heart: A Calling, created by Julia Davis and Jane Sheldon, has won the Interdisciplinary Collaboration category at the 2022 Northern Beaches Environmental Art and Design Awards. The work will be on exhibit at Manly Art Gallery until August 28.

Artist: Julia Davis

Composer, vocalist: Jane Sheldon

Video Editor: Blue Lucine

Double Bass: Clayton Thomas

Mix: Bob Scott

Camera: Tom Waugh

Drone Operator: Rian Taylor

Colourist: Angela Cerasi

4k video, stereo sound
Duration: 12:39

Sound Collectors Lab: Bloodwood Premiere at Melbourne Recital Centre

The Bloodwood Series is a performance-installation for voice, violin, percussion, electronics and porcelain, light and sound sculptures, created for Jane Sheldon, Anna McMichael, and Louise Devenish by composer and ceramicist Kate Moore. This work evokes a dystopian landscape filled with ghosts and fragmented memories, telling the story of dislocation and a search for identity through place.

Monday 15 August 2022 6pm

Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

Duration: 1 hour (no interval)

Click here for tickets.

Commissioned by APRA Art Music Fund.

Holland Festival: Antarctica World Premiere

This June, Sydney Chamber Opera makes its European debut at the Holland Festival, where it premieres the newest opera by leading Australian composer Mary Finsterer.

Cast:

Jane Sheldon
Jessica O’Donoghue
Anna Fraser
Michael Petruccelli
Simon Lobelson

With Asko|Schönberg Ensemble

Antarctica explores the historical, mythical and scientific conceptions and stories about the southern continent. With a mesmerising combination of musical elements from early and new music styles, we are transported into another world.

This fictional tale begins with three characters from the Age of Discovery miraculously conjured from the memory of a young girl: a cartographer, a natural scientist and a philosopher travelling by ship to Antarctica, all with different dreams and expectations concerning the mysterious landscape. But what they find is far greater than themselves…

Created by the outstanding production team behind La Passion de Simone, 2022 SCO Creative Residents Imara Savage, Elizabeth Gadsby, Alexander Berlage and Cannes award-winning filmmaker Mike Daly will interpret this new work alongside some of SCO’s favourite singers and the legendary Dutch new music ensemble Asko|Schönberg. Finsterer’s first opera for SCO, Biographica was described by The Australian as an “outstanding new opera deserving a permanent place in the repertory”, and expectations are high for her second. 

In order to prepare for her new opera, Finsterer organised a symposium at the University of Tasmania where she and librettist Tom Wright could meet with scientists from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies. In an age of increasing concern for our ecology, the displacement of populations and a heightened awareness of the vulnerability of our oceans, Antarctica is also an urgent story for today.

Photo credit: Dean Golja, State Library of Victoria

Eucalyptusdom

Jane has composed Eucalyptus Wind Rose, a sound installation for the Powerhouse Museum’s Eucalyptusdom exhibition opening July 1.

From the Powerhouse: “Eucalyptusdom reckons with our cultural history and ever-changing relationship with the gum tree, presenting over 400 objects from the Powerhouse Collection alongside 17 newly commissioned works by creative practitioners working across the fields of design, architecture, film, applied arts and performance.”

In Song

Jane is singing music by Fauré, Dusapin, Kurtág, and Finsterer in two recitals for this collaboration between Sydney Chamber Opera and Phoenix Central Park.

“Experience a month in the company of icons of sung modernism when Sydney Chamber Opera presents IN SONG:

Presented in a re-purposed Gothic church in Alexandria, this recital-installation is a series of four artsong programs tracing a journey from the dawn of musical expressionism to a diverse clutch of Australian and world premieres, illustrating where the form has found itself in the 21st century.

SCO’s adventurous and virtuosic singers Emily Edmonds, Anna Fraser, Simon Lobelson and Jane Sheldon will find common threads between composers, eras, styles and continents to craft a rare and comprehensive overview of the scintillating art of modern song.

Inside an evocative installation by artist Elizabeth Gadsby, these singers will illuminate a body of work indispensable to the artistic story of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Think artsong begins and ends at Schubert? Let IN SONG show you its recent past, present and future.”

Photo by Lisa Tomasetti

Reviews are out for poem for a dried up river

“4.5 stars

Jane Sheldon gives a gripping performance in a work that resonates powerfully with the climate crisis.”

— Limelight Magazine

“4 stars

…In many ways, this composition is an extension of Sheldon's recent work as a singer in which, in works such as Damien Ricketson's The Howling Girls, she has explored ways to make her voice more fully embodied in the subject of the drama and its expressive symbols. In this case there is a sense of continuum from the clay from which the work begins to the pure soprano sound she eventually achieves, like a pathway from the inanimate to the divine.” — Sydney Morning Herald

Photo by Lisa Tomasetti