Immersive and intimate :: ANAT CEO Melissa DeLaney’s residency at Edenhope

Throughout August, ANAT CEO Melissa DeLaney will undertake a month-long residency at Edenhope Artist Residency (EAR) on Gunditjmara Country in western Victoria. This artist-run initiative supports creative practitioners across disciplines—including artists, scientists, designers, and educators, with time, space, and resources to explore and develop their work.

Melissa’s residency will be grounded in her philosophy of the slow and the intimate, incorporating walking, writing, drawing, photography, and meditation into her evolving practice. With a focus on process, place, and the potential for creative exchange, Melissa views the residency as an opportunity to deepen her narrative-based practice and explore new modes of participatory and collaborative engagement.

Melissa notes that ‘Art making is a narrative in progress, it is a form of communication and story-telling. Sometimes I do this in solitude, other times with my collective and partnership and again in collaborative community projects. Art is process also for me, this is another value of residency programs. Where the day to day become part of the process, and where creative practice comes to the fore. I like to document this also as another layer to my work. I would like to incorporate mediation, walking, writing, drawing and photograph practices into my experiences of the site.

My philosophies are around the slow – and the intimate. I love the immersive nature of practice afforded by residency programs. The sense of space and place, to return into this creative space, away from distractions of my regular activities and routine. To be distracted more by this freshness of place and atmosphere. To completely absorb into the experience and to document this through my residency process. Part of my professional focus is to continually expand my experience and to work on projects enabling creative exchanges to occur and to develop participatory and collaborative projects with other creatives and communities.’