Victoria Spence

As an artist, performer and mentor, I work with people who are exploring relationships of power in how they make their work and how they engage with their audiences’. As a dramaturg, I work to ensure that the signifiers of meaning in non-narrative, image-based performance works convey the necessary nuance and clarity that are intended. As a ceremonialist, I work with people at the significant events of their lives, with a particular focus on mortality. I work with death; in all the ways it arrives and with after death and funeral care: accompanying, leading and following people as they move through these times, reinvigorating them as rites of passage and thresholds of potent presence and creativity.

The community memorial Picnic Among Friends offers new ways to gather to remember those we love who are no longer living. To come together into a safe and communal space in which we can bring creative and personal expression to love, loss and remembering. The Picnic Among Friends was a yearly event that ran for a decade in Sydney, from 2010-2019. For Cementa, it is offered to the festival participants, the local communities and artists as a space for breath, reflection and creative engagement. It honours love and loss, and the story tellers and story holders of Kandos and surrounding districts.

Initiating Artists and Cementa team are Julianne Campbell Clytie Smith Annette Tesoriero Kate Raffin Kate Brennan Debi Toman