Have you seen the forest dance?
City of Wodonga 17 Jul 2023

A large-scale video projection onto the exterior of Hyphen – Wodonga Library Gallery has been posing an important question.

Multi-disciplinary artist Nat Ord has pieced together a 28-minute film capturing the movement of plants, fungi and animals in the forest.

“It’s about getting people to look at them differently, getting people to stop and pay attention as they can be missed or overlooked,” she said.

The video portrait series is titled Forest Dance and was four years in the making, featuring the dances of the Chiltern Mt Pilot National Park, NSW Snowy Mountains and Lake St Clair National Park in Tasmania.

The projection is playing each night at Hyphen between 5.30pm and 11.30pm until the end of this month and was part of council's ephemeral art program - supporting local artists to create inspiring temporary public art.

Featured at Wodonga’s June CoCreate event, the projection on Hyphen's cantilever windows has had a lot of interest and Nat said it would ‘no doubt pop up somewhere else’.

A shorter version will be on show at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in September and earlier this year the video appeared in an exhibition at Batlow that explored the natural forest regeneration following the Black Saturday fires in the region.

“It’s great to be able to show the long form version here at Hyphen,” Nat said.

“It’s pretty commanding … just seeing it on that large scale and in that space is incredible.”