Rupture uses video and sound to illustrate some of the stressors in today’s world – from fires and floods to the relentless pace of modern life – alongside a performer’s depiction of the body’s response to trauma.

Artist Jessie Boylan was exploring how symptoms of ‘disorder’ could be seen as appropriate responses to trauma in a person’s personal life and their environment, rather than maladaptive responses to the world around them, when the installation was created.

“We’re constantly seeing more and more things that are stressful,” the La Trobe University Bendigo photography lecturer said.

“Our bodies are not separate from the world... We are not separate from the world.”

But Boylan said Rupture was intended to allow people to engage with the ideas, rather than to convey a specific message.

“You’ll go in there and experience whatever you experience,” she said.

Boylan collaborated with psychotherapist Jenna Tuke, digital media artist Linda Dement and writer and performer Virginia Barratt to create Rupture, which opens tomorrow and runs until February 10.

Curator Jessica Bridgfoot said Boylan had created an ambitious work that spoke to the contemporary age of anxiety.

“In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, Rupture offers an affecting experience that reveals to the audience physiological responses to trauma and global catastrophe – experienced both first-hand, and on our news feeds,” she said.

The installation forms part of the Bendigo Art Gallery’s Going Solo exhibition program, which showcases the work of contemporary Australian artists living and working in central Victoria.

Boylan is based in the region and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally.

She is a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild and is a key artist in Nuclear Futures.

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