What’s in a postcard? Baby, I just wanted to make you smile is an ongoing series of recorded endurance performances where the artist endeavours to share a sunset with her 100-kilo mechanical shark(Baby), by attempting to pull the shark up a hill. Frankie, the artists’ dog who has been equipped with their own camera, both witnesses and at times shares in these attempts.

The project revolves around the romantic and comic sublime, looking into the beauty of the absurd, especially within the urge to want to share something deeply with someone else. The work uses the slapstick materiality of the physical performance and its absurdity to question how different beings, bodies and brains all experience things differently.

Inspired by two of the artists’ favourite films; Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog and its corresponding behind the scenes documentary Burden of Dreams by Les Blank. The work investigates the Comic Sublime by looking at what it is to try and share joy, love, laughter and communicate in a universe filled with beings whose brains, existence and or bodies are built inherently differently to that of your own. The artist recognises the Comic Sublime as physically absurd phenomena, that despite its absurdity is occurring due to the sublime and absurd nature of existence itself.

The sound was created in collaboration between the artist and the musician Marelene Claudine Radice through prompts. The prompts were based on themes of Romantic longing and research into the different vibrational frequencies which sharks and other beings communicate through which the human being is consciously unaware.

The work investigates issues of labor, examining how we quantify and experience the physical in an increasingly digital world. The absurd is used in the work to generate questions surrounding concepts of care, empathy, compassion and labour when it comes to the physical world as well as within past, current and potential future technological advancements.

Please contact the artist directly if interested in viewing the work.

Three performances from the work were screened as part of the artists graduating honours body of work Bedtime Stories for Tired Bots at the Australian National University School of Art and Design, winning the Peter and Lena Karmel Anniversary award for the most outstanding graduating body of work.