Hi City of Melb!
I’m honor Eastly.

Like many artists this year, I had my dreams cut short when my major work of 2020 (a live event at one of Australia’s premier arts venues) had to be postponed due to COVID-19.

To deal with the fallout I am proposing to use this quick response arts grant to develop and present online one of my major works currently in development, a photographic series produced over two years called Emotional Labour.

On this page I’ve gathered together a bunch of relevant information to support my proposal to City of Melbourne. Here you’ll find answers to the following questions:

1. What is this project and why did you make it?

2. Why are you the right person to make this?

Let’s get started!

1. What is this project and why make it?

Emotional Labour is a photographic series designed to be a wry, inquisitive, relatable interrogation into how we think about emotional sensitivity.

Created over a period of two years, the artist (me) meticulously collected and documented all instances of her crying.

(You did what? I hear you ask).

Yeah, I collected all my tears - it was very arduous.

The result is a collection (with over 500 entries) that acts both as a memoir, and a meditation on emotional sensitivity.

Designed initially as a photographic series to be exhibited, I propose to use this grant to redevelop this series to be presented online.

I currently have already photographed c.50 of these “crying entries”. To redevelop this work for online I will photograph the other c.450 entries in the series. They will then be logged, uploaded to social media scheduler tools and published via social media feeds in real time.

“In real time”, what does that mean?

That means each entry will be published on the same day that it occurred, e.g. the above entry, “MAY 13TH, Fucking onions” occurred May 13th, 2015 and so will be uploaded to the feed May 13th, 2020. This feed will be scheduled to post the full series over two years.

You can look at an example of how it will appear on Instagram here. This will be accompanied by another feed of user-submitted content of people talking about times they have cried that will be updated for the first two months.

Why make this project?

At the start of 2015 I realised that I had spent most of my 25 years believing that I cried “too much”. I - like society at large - believed emotionally sensitivity was a kind of weakness, or at best, an inconvenience to be tolerated.

And yet, given crying is such a private endeavour, I had no yard stick to measure my emotional sensitivity against.

So naturally I started collecting my tears, so I could create that yard stick.

The resulting series is intended to be an entry point into conversations around how we regulate, accommodate, and accept our internal emotional lives.

Inspired by the likes of Miranda July and Sophie Calle, I wanted to utilise long-term diaristic documentation as a way for the audience to make sense of and understand their own internal emotional experience.

And releasing it online in this way just serves to push the envelope. By publishing the full series in real-time over two years, the audience can experience and compare their own emotional experience in real-time to mine.

Why now?

Projects that seek to understand and enlighten audiences to their own emotional sensitivity is now more pertinent than ever given the current COVID-19 crisis. Melburnians are now experiencing increased anxiety, fear, and panic. This project gives them a real-time acknowledgement that it’s okay to feel vulnerable, and the awareness that within time, things will change. This self-compassion is key to the continued wellbeing of Melburnians through this crisis and beyond.

2. Why are you the right person to make this?

Well firstly, who else has a collection of two years of their own tears stuffed in their garage?

Yeah, not many people.

But seriously, I’ve been making highly-acclaimed, digital, feelings-centric work for the past ten years.

Below are three of the most relevant examples.

ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED PODCASTS OF 2018.

“Total magic” - The Atlantic

“Quite simply, the best thing I’ve heard all year”
- The Financial Times

“Impressive, bruising and tender storytelling” - Benjamin Law

I was selected from over 1200 pitches as a winner of the ABC $1mil podcasting fund to create the experimental memoir, No Feeling Is Final.

The series was named top 3 podcast of the year by infamous The Atlantic “best of” list (and scored a spot in many other lists). It also won the Director’s Choice award in the international podcasting competition that is widely regarded as being the “Oscars for Podcasts”. (Which was bloody ace!)

You can listen to the trailer episode here.

Involvement:
- content creation and editing
- branding and website design
- program development
- marketing