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About

Welcome to the Heart of Gold website!

This website showcases the 'Heart of Gold Projects' and other work by Western Australian artists Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont.
These are a series of five projects that vary in medium from photography to dance-performance, film, and tableaux vivant. They were initially designed as thematic and visual research for a theatre work we have in development, but they are also artworks in their own right.

We will also be giving updates on 'Heart of Gold', a theatre work we have had in development since 2004 with artist and writer Thea Costantino. Appropriating tropes of burlesque, music theatre, cinema, and military propaganda, the work explores myths of nationhood in contrast to narratives of isolation, desire and horror. See below for details.

Please check out the gallery page on this website for images and more of an idea of what the 'Heart of Gold Projects' consisted of.


Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont
xxx
contact:
pilar at heartofgold.net.au
or
tarryn at heartofgold.net.au

News

HOLD YOUR HORSES IN ASSOCIATION WITH PICA AND SIDE PONY PRODUCTIONS PRESENT

HEART OF GOLD

BY THEA COSTANTINO

Westralia shall be free.

PICA Performance Space: 29 October - 14 November 2009
book online at pica.org.au or (08) 9228 6300

Director: Zoe Pepper
Composer / Musical Director: Ash Gibson Greig
Choreographer / Costume designer: Tarryn Gill
Set designer: Pilar Mata Dupont
Lighting Designer: Lucy Birkinshaw
Stage Manager: Nicole Gillespie

Heart of Gold is a new, darkly comic musical set in rural WA, featuring a family unravelled by secrets, a haunted landscape and one boy's fantasy of West Australia forever at war with the Eastern states.

Iris Brown and her children Angus and Violet are a family living in isolation on the outskirts of Paucity. Their solitude is broken by the entrance of Constable Irving Saddle, the only guest to attend Violet's dismal fourteenth birthday party. As Irving's control gradually infects the household, Angus's already unhinged perception of reality is stretched to dangerous proportions. He retreats into a nationalistic fantasy world 'Westralia' defended by a sinister, Ziegfeld-esque female army which embodies the family's dark past. Angus's waking and dreaming lives merge into one another, and Irving uncovers the horrible secret beneath the house.

Director Zoe Pepper [Side Pony Productions: Devil's Gulch, A Dastardly Deed, London; Manic Pony, Artrage] brings her characteristically bittersweet mix of horror and delight to the work, while award-winning composer Ash Gibson Greig [The Lady Aoi, Thin Ice; Who Do You Think You Are, SBS] unsettles the lyrical melody of music theatre with dark and often dissonant orchestrations.

Heart of Gold is produced by Hold Your Horses, a new WA company who facilitate collaboration between theatre and visual artists. Choreography and set design are by contemporary art duo Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, whose work recently featured in national exhibitions Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland.

Featuring performances by Tim Watts (Angus), the creator of 'Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer' and winner of 'Outstanding solo show' at the NYC Fringe Festival 09; performer and playwright Shirley Van Sanden (Iris); singer, musician and performer Brendan Ewing (Irving); recent star of 'Oscar', Sarah McKellar (Violet) and the Westralian Army, Natalya Alessi, Oda Aunan, Maree Cole, Lily Newbury-Freeman and Whitney Richards.

Heart of Gold on the PICA website

Basil Sellers Art Prize

Tarryn and Pilar have recently been selected as two of 15 finalists for the Basil Sellers Art Prize 2010. Sport has been a recurring theme in Australian art. For artists today, sport touches upon anything from everyday life through to globalisation, from the concrete experience of a game through to abstract notions like cheating and fair play. Sport is about winners and losers, individuals and teams, rules and penalties, equipment and architecture, fans and souvenirs, triumphs and scandals. The Basil Sellers Art Prize defines sport in the broadest possible sense. In 2010, an acquisitive prize of $100,000 will be awarded to a single, outstanding artwork, displayed in an exhibition of shortlisted finalists at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne.

Hold Your Horses

Exciting news! We have formed a production group called Hold Your Horses with Thea Costantino. Look out for updates! Photo by Kim Tran

Heart of Gold Project 5. The All Australian Surf Lifesaver series acquired by QAG