ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab: Writing & Concepts – Liang Luscombe

In this lively lecture/performance, director and visual artist Liang Luscombe will discuss how her practice as a visual artist and sculptor informs her process of writing and directing for the screen, whilst showcasing her new work Malamadre .

Supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants.

Writing & Concepts is a lecture and performance series exploring the insights practitioners have into their own creative and cultural practices.

About Liang Luscombe

Liang Luscombe’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and moving image that engages in a process of generative questioning of how images and film affect audiences. She received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. She has been included in screenings at Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; AceOPEN, Adelaide; MetroArts, Brisbane; OpenTV, Chicago; Comfort Station, Chicago; and Vehicle, NYC. She has undertaken residencies at Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH residency program, Chicago, 2019; SOMA Summer, Mexico City, 2018; Australia Council Studio, British School at Rome, 2013; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Studio Residency, Perth, 2011.

About Malamadre

Malamadre, a humorous work of science fiction and puppetry, follows two friends Fran and So. After escaping the clutches of Earth, the pair travel to an intergalactic tax haven, HOWL, for exhausted women. Upon arrival each human is assigned a praying mantis-like creature or Hexapoda which initiates a symbiotic relationship. The Hexapoda attaches itself to the host’s abdomen, like a child, where it feeds off toxicity that enters the human’s bloodstream from HOWL’s air. Throughout Malamadre, Fran must reckon with her own maternal fears in relation to the matriarchal leader of the Hexapoda, Malamadre, a giant puppet alien creature that can reproduce through parthenogenesis.