GRIT
Images Nat Cartney.
In development
December 2025, January 2026
This project was made possible through the Artist Support grant from Inner West Council.
Choreographer/director: Emma Harrison
Sound designer: Amy Flannery
Mentor/dramaturg: Adriane Daff
In GRIT, I want to investigate “invasive species” and their slow violence on both bodies and land, drawing together lived experiences and broader socio-political landscapes. These include my experience with endometriosis as a chronic, invasive illness; the absurd, cartoon-like yet destructive spread of cane toads in Australia that I experienced growing up in regional Queensland; and the extractive logic of mining and capitalism, embodied by Australia’s Gina Rinehart. I see all of these as forms of invasion and toxicity. Foreign elements that creep in, grow wildly, and eventually poison their host.
Through this lens, I want to explore the body and the land as parallel colonised spaces: sites of ownership, regulation, and conquest. Sites of minimal invasion. Some of the questions I am working with are: What is the line between pervasive and invasive? What does it mean for the body to be invaded, regulated, or exploited? When does something familiar, ordinary, or even necessary tip into excess, toxicity, or danger? What does it mean for something to be ‘minimally invasive’?
December 2025, January 2026
This project was made possible through the Artist Support grant from Inner West Council.
Choreographer/director: Emma Harrison
Sound designer: Amy Flannery
Mentor/dramaturg: Adriane Daff
In GRIT, I want to investigate “invasive species” and their slow violence on both bodies and land, drawing together lived experiences and broader socio-political landscapes. These include my experience with endometriosis as a chronic, invasive illness; the absurd, cartoon-like yet destructive spread of cane toads in Australia that I experienced growing up in regional Queensland; and the extractive logic of mining and capitalism, embodied by Australia’s Gina Rinehart. I see all of these as forms of invasion and toxicity. Foreign elements that creep in, grow wildly, and eventually poison their host.
Through this lens, I want to explore the body and the land as parallel colonised spaces: sites of ownership, regulation, and conquest. Sites of minimal invasion. Some of the questions I am working with are: What is the line between pervasive and invasive? What does it mean for the body to be invaded, regulated, or exploited? When does something familiar, ordinary, or even necessary tip into excess, toxicity, or danger? What does it mean for something to be ‘minimally invasive’?