ARIXCHANGE 2.0

ARIXCHANGE is an ongoing collaborative exchange series between artist-run initiatives Blindside (Narrm/Melbourne) and Sawtooth (Lutruwita/Tasmania).

Presented this year as a digital residency, ARIXCHANGE 2.0 brings together two recent graduates, Isabella Rose Cort (Narrm/Melbourne) and Amy Baillie (Lutruwita/Tasmania), for a digital presentation of their work

As part of the residency, Amy Baillie and Isabella Rose Cort virtually connected in a series of development sessions with mentors from Sawtooth and Blindside, finding creative ways to reimagine their performance-driven practices for a digital context.

Follow the links below to view their works on the ARIXCHANGE website (best suited to landscape browsers).

Amy Baillie

'Tarptholomé-[CCTV]' (2026)

Approved For Release 14/06/2002: CIA-RCP81R00560R000200020001-0 NATIONAL INVESTIGATIONS COMMITTEE ON AERIAL PHENOMENA

IDENTIFIED: TARPTHOLOMÉ

9th Floor, Canberra House 40 Marcus Clarke Street Canberra City ACT 2601

ACT 20026

Isabella Rose Cort

'hush heresy heave [iteration 2]' (2026)

'hush heresy heave [iteration 2]' presents an interactive digital environment, seeking to explore the notion of hysteria as both release from and consequence of our daily hypersaturated on-and-offline experience. Set amongst the streets of Melbourne’s CBD, the work culminates as an archive of recorded daily moments, featuring overheard glimpses of conversation, news headlines, advertisements, and the artist's own reflections and poetic writings. Behind the interlacing text and imagery, a cinematic film of the artist’s moving body remains centre. Here, a choreographed score of improvised dance movement unfolds, as Isabella embodies and negotiates the sensations of the surrounding city. These actions maintain a hysterical quality, ranging from the celebratory to the convulsive, and eventually increasing in franticness like the capitalist terrains at its core.

Positioned as a form of cathartic resistance, the artist has come to understand the performance of hysteria beyond its historical, mythological or pseudo-scientific roots. Rather, here the hysterical becomes a just and rebellious feminist action, allowing sensory overload to find peace, restlessness to release, and the daily observations of the body-mind to be brought to the forefront. This feminist-hysterical dance is then presented beneath the commercial gaze of the camera lens, whilst also being overlaid with a series of ever-drifting handheld recordings and text. These passing fragments of film present a further insight into the artist's experience, ultimately mimicking the movements of daily city wandering, and blurring in and out of focus. Together, these materials engage with each other through a sense of hysterical choreography, which has since become a key tenant of the artist’s practice.

Across Isabella’s recent practice, she has sought to explore the physiological and psychosomatic experience of the hysterical body through movement, film, and text, whilst engaging with the day-to-day contexts of Western consumer-capitalist society. By understanding visual arts practice through the lens of choreography, the artist has been able to utilize her experience as a professionally trained classical ballerina, and explore her creative work through a body-led approach. Familiarly, creative practice is then an extension of the body’s experience and held understandings, translating the psychosomatic into physical choreography, and choreography into the qualities of visual material.